I have been using gramps on a daily basis for years now, and I am very pleased with it.
Now there is something I would like to register, and I don´t know what is the best way.
In my part of the world, after one of the parents dies, guardians were appointed for underage children. They were supposed to look after the children’s properties until they become of age.
Most of the time this was a familiy member from the side of the father and one from the side of the mother. If there were no family members present (willing?), the guardians would be appointed by court.
What is the best way to register this in Gramps? I would to be able to link the child to the guardian somehow.
Create an association on the main person and then create a matching association with the other person.
Alternatively you can create the association with the first person and then use the Sync Associations Tool addon to add the reciprocal Association but this also required updating the addons ASSOC_LOOKUP = table and if you use the new association type “momboor” quite often you may need to submit a feature request for the new type.
An option suggested in the wiki is to use Guardian/Ward roles in the Will or Probate events.
In my family history, a father died around age 61 intestate in the 1860s. And 3 of his 7 offspring were under 16. The 0rphans Court appointed a trustee to administer the estate for the widow and guardians for each of the 3 minors until they reached their majority.
So I put the terms of the court directives in a Note under the Probate event, shared the Probate event to each of the involved person with their Role, and linked each Person as they were mentioned in the related term.
This established links in 2 directions: shared Event, Note. So an Association would have been doubly redundant.
All Association types, except “Godfather”, are custom entries.
This is an easy process. Copy an existing syncing option and create 2 new lines, one for each to the other association. You can use it for terms in any language as these will not translate.
Personally, I would create a second family for the minor children, with the “parents” then having “guardian” as their legal relationship.
The only problem is that we can’t specify a timeframe for this “family” since it runs from the court decision until each child reaches the age of majority.
We can add a note somewhere to indicate this. For example, if there are two children involved, add two notes to this family, one for each child with their information, and share each note with the child concerned.
Alternatively, the court decision itself can be the subject of a “Guardianship Placement” event, which is shared with the children, guardians, and family involved. The aforementioned note concerning the specific guardianship period for each child can then be attached to their particular reference part of the shared event.
In my example above, there was no household relationship with the court appointed guardian. So a ‘family’ with the guardian would be inaccurate.
The guardianship was simply a legal fiction – because females had no legal standing in the USA at the time. The widow couldn’t sell the property or execute a lease with a landlord. (In actuality, she and the minor children were taken into the household of the youngest adult son. He eventually sued the other sons for financial help supporting her.)
In France, it’s often a grandparent from each family of the parents, but not always; it can be an uncle or aunt, or simply an administrator appointed by the judge. The “family” is then merely a “box” to group them together.
Often here too, but it can depend on the marriage contract.
I’ve used associations to record guardianships, but now I think I’ll try using events instead. I like the idea of having a begin and end date, and having just one thing (a shared event) instead of two things (reciprocal associations). Then it could be easier to see which other events occurred during that span. I would keep it separate from events for will and probate, since the dates and people involved would be different.
And I feel that “family” is simply a software fiction . If the family structure were not so critical to genealogy apps, I would consider just using shared events for births (to link parents and children), shared events for marriages (with date spans, open-ended for currently married couples), etc.
I’ve often thought about the distinction between “family” and “household”. A family may include all of the children born to (or adopted by, etc.) a pair of parents, but the composition of a household changes over time, and may include non-family members. I would love to track households, but I have only point-in-time evidence for household membership (census records). I do use shared events for those, but they are just for a single date. And even if I knew how long a set of people lived together as a household, an event with a date range might not be sufficient, since the household could move from one place to another during that time.
. If the family structure were not so critical to genealogy apps, I would consider just using shared events for births (to link parents and children), shared events for marriages (with date spans, open-ended for currently married couples), etc.