Individuals and their relationships to each other are the core of genealogy, yet traditional genealogy software typically places the traditional nuclear family at the centre of genealogy. Not all traditional genealogy software does so, but most does, in part because of the influence of GEDCOM.
The Core of Genealogy explained that this is wrong. Genealogy isn't some privilege of traditional nuclear families. Genealogy is not restricted to any type of family at all. No particular type of family is more important than others. Placing the traditional nuclear family at the core of genealogy does not make any sense. At the core of honest genealogy are individuals and their relationships to each other, regardless of what type of family they are part of.
The problem with genealogy software based on the traditional nuclear family is not just that it fails to support other families, but also that it force-fits everything and everyone into its limited model of the world.
family-centred
A lot of traditional genealogy software places the traditional nuclear family central, sometimes out of the misguided belief that dogmatic ideas about family should be promoted through genealogy software, but most often out of uncritical emulation of existing software and blind adherence to the GEDCOM model.
Many of these vendors think of their software as family-centred
, yet
that is exactly what it is not…
Genealogy software that puts the traditional nuclear family central is not
honestly advertised as such. Many genealogy software vendors limit the
usefulness of their
software this way, yet none of these vendors honestly advertises suitable for
traditional nuclear families only
.
Vendors that put the traditional nuclear family central in their software
simply aren't big proponents of truth. On the contrary, their software systemically
violates the truth over and over again. The problem with genealogy software
based on the traditional nuclear family is not just that it fails to support
other family structures, but also that it force-fits everything and everyone into its
limited model of the world. A particular telling example is the so-called Family Group
report
.
At first blush, the so-called Family Group
reports seems innocuous. It provides an overview of a family; the parents and their children. That seems a handy report to have available, and it
is a handy report, but only if it is implemented right, and most
traditional genealogy does not implement it right and cannot implement it right,
because it lacks all sense of family. All it has is a rigid model that all facts
are forced into. That rigid model is a spectacular failure…
Some traditional genealogy software, most notably PAF, is not just in denial of non-traditional families, but also remarkably unsympathetic towards situations that do not fit that model. PAF is painfully blunt; it automatically claims that any two people that have children together are married. There are many situations were that is not just wrong, but also incredibly insensitive.
There are quite a few one-parent family where the partner never was part of
that family, yet the so-called Family Group
report always lists both parents. This is
effectively a denial of the existence of one-parent families.
It often happens that one partner dies and the other marries again. The new
partner may bring a few children into the family. The new couple may get a few
more children. All those people together are one family, yet most traditional
software has a hard time recognising that. If you print a so-called Family Group
reports for this couple, the older children from the previous marriage are
probably completely absent. Even a hint that both were married before may be
missing.
It is often possible to get the software to show the entire family by creating
adoption links between the older children and the new couple, but the fact
remains that the software defaults to showing just a couple and their children. It could default to showing all children for both partners. It could default to showing a chain of partners and all their children. However, as long
as it the report is advertised as and labeled a Family Group
report, it should
show the entire group of individuals living together as a family.
It is somewhat funny that ostensibly family-oriented software is incapable of presenting a family report for what is perhaps the most traditional family of all, a bunch of generations living together. While the adoption link may provide a mechanism to ensure that children from previous relations are shown as part of a family, there is no such mechanism to group multiple generations together. The ostensible family-oriented software is in such denial of anything but the traditional nuclear family, that it is even incapable of showing a traditional multi-generation family.
Software based on the traditional nuclear family is also completely incapable of handling of handling families with two same-sex partners. Forget trying to print a Family Group report, you cannot even enter the family without lying about the gender of one of the partners.
When you think long enough about what genealogy software based on the
traditional nuclear family does and does not, what it can do and cannot do, you
cannot help but make what initially seems an paradoxical observation; such
family-centred
software has no sense of family at all. The software is not family-centric
at all, it is couple-centric instead.
The so-called Family Group
reports of traditional genealogy software
are not really
Family reports, they are Couple & Children reports. Those
reports do not show a family, they show a couple and their children. Whether the
people on that report ever formed a family together does not matter to the
software at all. Family may
be hard to define concept, but it is not hard to see that it means a whole lot
more than a couple and their children presented in a fixed family structure.
All these issues are not limited to the mislabeled Family Group
report, it is
inherent in the software's mistaken design, and shows up in its major views.
PAF 5.2.18 has its Family view
,
which has nothing to do whether the people in that view form a family at all, but is just a
Couple & Children view. Similarly, RootsMagic 4 has a Family View
that is
really a Couple & Children view. Family Tree Maker 2011 has
a People
view, which is a combination of a Couple & Children view with
the pedigree of one of the two presumed partners. Legacy Family Tree 7.4 has a
Family view
that additionally shows just the parents of the couple, but it too is
essentially a Couple & Children view.
Every major traditional genealogy application pretends to have a Family view, but all they support is a rather mechanical Couple & Children view, that has nothing to do with whether the people shown in that view ever formed a family. None of these applications offers a real family view. None of these application has any concept of family, they just abuse the word family as if it is a perfect a synonym for any couple and their children.
That this abusage of the word family is so consistent throughout the industry is not very surprising. All these vendors are still focussed on traditional genealogy. They have all been influenced by each other and the GEDCOM specification, which refers to any couple and their children as a family, regardless of whether they ever formed a family together or not.
It is not just the reports. It is the views too. It is the abusage of the word throughout the software and the help files. Practically all of it seems designed to misleads the user into thinking of family as a synonym for a couple and their children. This is utterly wrong. There are other families and many couples never formed a family together.
Ironically, traditionalfamily-centredgenealogy software has no sense of family at all.
Ironically, traditional family-centred
genealogy software has no sense
of family at all. The software does not focus on family at all, it merely has a unfortunate
deleterious focus on one particular family structure to the
exclusion of all others.
A lot of traditional genealogy software makes the mistake of placing the traditional nuclear family at the
centre of its design and then bluntly assumes that everything and everyone fits
that structure, without regard for how insensitive and inappropriate that assumption
might be.
It has no real sense of what a family is, it merely has one particular family
structure at the centre of its design, and makes everything fit that single data structure.
The designers may wish to think of that structure as the traditional nuclear
family, but the way they actually use it has nothing to do with family at all. It is
merely a couple-with-children structure that's consistently mispresented as
family
, as if the couple-with-children structure is the only possible family structure.
Any actual understanding or real sense of family is completely absent.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.