I came across a burial record where a person attending the service was qualified “her brother”. Since this man was already in my DB, I added the deceased woman and created a family without parents to record the brother-sister relationship.
Then I generated a family lines graph with both persons as “Persons of Interest”. I expected to get an oval node (labelled 2 children) with arrows pointing to the designated persons (the deceased woman and the whole tree for the man).
I got two disconnected components: an “isolated” woman and my already known tree.
Is this the intended result?
I looked at the code and saw that there is a call to self.remove_uninteresting_parents() which is controlled by self._removeextra. But this option is not ticked in the dialog options.
I understand from find_parents(self) that a “family” is added only when there is at least one known parent. In my case, all children are part of the graphs (there are only two presently).
My workaround was to add a fake parent to the family. However, I am not satisfied by it because it suggests I have found this ancestor (and it is likely I’ll never find it because I am at the older edge of the available records).
How could the Family Lines graph generator be modified so that when there are at least two children in the graph, the family is also added to it to show graphically the relationship?
This appears to be the current behavior of the Family Lines Graph rather than a bug. The graph generator generally creates a family node only when the family has at least one known parent. As a result, a sibling-only family with no recorded parents is treated as two unrelated individuals for graphing purposes, even though the relationship exists in the database.
Your workaround of adding a placeholder parent does make the graph connect, but I agree it is not an ideal solution because it introduces genealogical information that is not actually known.
A possible enhancement would be to modify the graph generation logic so that if a family has two or more children included in the graph, a family node is still created even when both parents are unknown. The node could simply display something like “Unknown Parents” or “2 children” and connect the siblings without implying that any ancestor has been identified. This would preserve the documented sibling relationship while avoiding the need for fictitious parents.
This sounds like a reasonable feature request, especially for researchers working with incomplete historical records where sibling relationships are known but parentage is not. It would improve the visual representation without compromising data accuracy.
It is likely that this is because the non-existent parents don’t have a surname that matches the People of Interest. The workaround for not graphing parents of Females is worth trying.