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Often it is not certain whether a person is a child of one family or of another. I therefore would like to be able to assign the child to multiple families (and then have K&K prompt to automatically set the "Definite" attribute to False for all families with which the child is associated).

This functionality should be optional and should be turned off by default, so that when a child is added to a family, K&K would prompt to remove the child from any other families it is associated with, as before. But if the user has set a preference to allow multiple family-child associations, then the confirmation prompt should merely indicate that the "Definite" attribute will be set to False for all the child's family associations.

Some impacts of this would be:

- If the child marries (thus forming a new family), a line is drawn from each of the child's "source families" to the child's own family.

- If an ancestral chart is drawn (which includes an import into TreeDraw), all the child's parental paths need to be drawn.

- Recursion checks to ensure a person is not a descendant of him/herself would need to follow more paths

- Might need to adjust how GEDCOM files are output

The advantage of this function would be that uncertain but possible parent-child relationships would be clearly, graphically documented in the K&K database, rather than hidden away in the notes somewhere. I've encountered many cases in old records where this would be useful.

I have several children on my database who died young and do not appear on any census returns. As I am uncertain as to which family they belong to I have either, to assign them to a possible family, or leave them in limbo. My solution is to create a dummy family and add all the in limbo children with a particular surname to that family. I suspect that the database entry for a person can only have one link to a parent family, so while multiple parents may be a better solution, it may require a major redesign of the database.

John Wood

Actually there is no uniqueness contraint on a family/person association in the database - I used DDQM to insert a person as a child into multiple families (in the Links table), and the person was displayed in those families on the tree area and was listed properly when I right-clicked on the families.

However, when I created a new family with the person, a line was drawn only from one of his parent families to the new family. Also, when I generated an ancestral tree from the person (in TreeDraw), only one of his parent families was drawn.

So there would be a little work to do, but I think only at the application layer, not in the database.