Aha, thanks Dennis for the clarification! So the issue is that the child-father relationship might in fact be multiple or ambivalent. If a genealogy program forces a complex reality into a Procrustrian Bed of everyone having but one father, it obviously fails to capture the complexity of real life. One source of my confusion is that I don't seem to have that problem with my own genealogical application. Are the applications mentioned in this thread for some reason made more restrictive? In my application (LifeLines) for example, I can readily create an event record of any kind. The template is: 0 EVEN 1 REFN 1 DATE 1 PLAC 1 INDI 2 NAME 2 ROLE 1 SOUR I can also create user-defined records that I can name almost any way I want. Here is the template, where XXXX can be almost anything: 0 XXXX 1 REFN I can form any kind of social relation. A RELA could be, for example, god-father, biological father, second father, etc. Template for this: 0 INDI 1 NAME 1 ASSO 2 RELA I can have a family record with two fathers, for example, or a person can be a child in more than one family. There can be same-sex parents and adoptive relations. Is this difficult in other applications? -- Haines Brown, KB1GRM

Haines Brown wrote: > In my application (LifeLines) for example, I can readily create an event > record of any kind. The template is: LifeLines allows you to put into the file almost anything the GEDCOM spec allows, and a few things it doesn't. Most programs are not that flexible. For example 0 @I1@ INDI 1 FAMC @F100@ 1 FAMC @F200@ 0 @F100@ FAM 1 HUSB @I25@ 1 HUSB @I35@ 0 @I35@ INDI 1 SEX F Technically this is not legal in the GEDCOM spec. Even in LifeLines, how do you display it on screen or report (GEDCOM displays don't count)? -- Wes Groleau A UNIX signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of a black velvet clown painting. It's a rectangle of carets surrounding a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who. -- Chris Maeda Ha, ha, Dr. ..... Who's Chris Maeda? -- Wes Groleau

Wes Groleau <groleau+news@freeshell.org> writes: > Haines Brown wrote: >> In my application (LifeLines) for example, I can readily create an event >> record of any kind. The template is: > > LifeLines allows you to put into the file almost anything > the GEDCOM spec allows, and a few things it doesn't. Most > programs are not that flexible. For example > > 0 @I1@ INDI > 1 FAMC @F100@ > 1 FAMC @F200@ > 0 @F100@ FAM > 1 HUSB @I25@ > 1 HUSB @I35@ > 0 @I35@ INDI > 1 SEX F > > Technically this is not legal in the GEDCOM spec. > Even in LifeLines, how do you display it on screen > or report (GEDCOM displays don't count)? Wes, I think you can see some of the reason for my not understanding the restraints that folks have been mentioning. Yes, I've not worried much yet about how to display the data on screen or print it (just getting my feet wet). The main thing has been to gather and store data. There are apps that show much of the data, but not anything that shows it all in the form of an inclusive report rather than raw data. What is a "GEDCOM display"? Do you refer to the RootsWeb GEDCOM dump? Or the display of the data itself? (which for me so far has sufficed). Do you mean a chart display? There are GEDCOM -> HTML converters, but I assume they all use a fixed and limited number of tags. -- Haines Brown, KB1GRM