How to Record and Draw Multiple Marriages, Step-Families and Adoptions

Second marriages, half-siblings, step-children and adoptions confuse many family tree programs. Here is how to record them correctly and how a good chart should draw them.

Real families are not tidy. People marry twice, raise step-children, adopt, and sometimes marry a cousin. Recording these situations correctly is not hard, but drawing them clearly is where most charting tools fail. Here is how to handle each case, and what a good chart should do with it.

Second and later marriages

In GEDCOM, every marriage is a separate family record (FAM) with its own husband, wife and children. A person who married twice simply belongs to two family records. Record the marriage date in each, and the divorce or the death of the first spouse if you know it, so that the order of the marriages is clear.

On a chart, the person should appear once, standing between the two spouses: the earlier marriage on the left, the later one on the right, with the children of each marriage under their own marriage line. A chart that repeats the person next to each spouse forces the reader to find both boxes and work out that they are the same individual. PrintFamilyTree draws a person once with a partner on each side; only a third or later spouse is shown with a small dashed reference box, because there is no third side to a box.

Half-siblings

Half-siblings share one parent. If you record the two marriages correctly, they will be drawn under different marriage lines of the same parent, next to each other. Nothing else is needed. Resist the temptation to add all of the children to one family record; you would lose the information about who their other parent was.

Step-children

A step-child is the child of your spouse, not of you. In most programs you can add a child to a family with the relationship type step for one parent. In the file that becomes a CHIL line with a note such as _FREL Step. On a chart, a step-child belongs primarily under their biological parents and can be shown in the step-family as a dashed reference box with a dashed riser, so that the relationship is visible without pretending it is biological.

Adoption

Record adoptive parents as a separate parent link with the type adopted, and keep the biological parents if you know them. The child's primary place on the chart is with the biological family when it is known; the adoptive family shows the child as a reference. If you prefer the adoptive family to be the primary one, most programs let you set the preferred parents, and the chart follows that order.

Marriages between relatives

Cousin marriages were common in small villages. The two people are related by blood and by marriage, so both appear in the tree twice: once under their own parents and once as a spouse. A chart should draw each of them once as a full box and once as a dashed reference, and place the children under the spouse who is closer to the central person.

Unknown partners

If a child's other parent is unknown, leave the spouse empty rather than inventing a placeholder. The chart then hangs the child directly below the known parent's box, which tells the reader exactly what you know: one parent, and no more.

Checklist before you print

• Every marriage is its own family record with a date if known.
• Children are listed in the family of their biological parents.
• Step and adoptive relationships carry the relationship type.
• Unknown parents are left empty, not filled with Unknown.

Follow these rules and even a family with three marriages and an adoption will come out of the layout engine as a readable diagram, with every person exactly once.