Re: Genealogical evidence and data model

Aha, thanks Dennis for the clarification!

So the issue is that the child-father relation****p 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-*** parents
and adoptive relations. Is this difficult in other applications? 
   
-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM