You are mostly right.
You create a number of families with the same father and different spouses.
If you don’t know which woman has given birth to a child, you can place the child under the family, which are legally responsible (probably the family with the primary wife).
You might also want to add adoption to one or more of the families.
I don’t think a father-only family makes sense. But if it does, then you would need to create adoptions to this family for each child.
Another way to look at it is create a node for each spouse and another
with no spouse add all the children to the node without a spouse because
the father is the only known genetic link (without DNA testing) always
assuming the various females were being truthful about the father of
their child/children.
phil
If there are more than one children where only the father is known I recommend to put them in separate families where only the father exists. If you put them together in one family makes only sense if you know that they all have the same unknown mother. But in most such cases you don’t know that.
If you know who/what family the children lived with, add them all to that family and just add a custom type to the female part in the main family…
As far as I can find, it was common for concubines to live in the same household as the man and his primary wife, but they held a lower social status. So then, you could perhaps use a custom type like:"
Matriarchal Household Authority
Hierarchical Motherhood
Symbolic Motherhood
Institutional Motherhood
Matronal Responsibility
For concubines’ relationships with the children in the household, you could also use a custom type like:
Maternal Influence Without Attribution – When concubines contributed to child-rearing, but their maternity was not documented.
Shared Household Guardian – When children grew up in the same household with concubines but did not necessarily have a biological relationship.
Potential Biological Mother – When documentation is missing, but a concubine was a likely mother of the child.
Social Motherhood Assignment – When society automatically treated the concubine as a maternal figure for all household children.
Household Caregiver Without Status – When concubines played a caregiving role but did not hold a formal maternal position.
This way you will get one family less… (Digression and an idea: -how about a "household item in Gramps that can hold multiple families?)
Note: These were suggestions generated by Copilot upon request and instruction from me. Personally I am no expert on the topic.
I do not care for this approach. Mostly because Gramps does not have special handling for Custom Types of relationships.
For the most part, Reports and Charts are going to to ignore the relationship type. In many cases, the custom type will be entirely invisible.
Plus Gramps does not have a good way of handling more than a single primary family.
As another COMPLETELY non-standard idea, it occurs to me that sometimes the women in a polygamous marriage are referred to as “sister wives”. Maybe this would be another option for associating them? That they be added as offspring in a parentless family, ordered by primacy?
You could still use a custom Relationship type. Although that would be just a reminder to NOT add parents. I also try keep any custom type to a single generic word, where possible. (Although any custom type that will not be re-used in multiple places should probably be done with a different approach.)
I never use any of the reports in Gramps, so it is not a big issue for me. What is more important is having well-defined names for relations and associations when they are not part of a main family relationship. I use these as labels in Network Graphs, in Aeon Timeline, and in my markdown library (Foam, Obsidian) to describe relationships, links, and associations within my notes. They also serve as key names for YAML when needed.
The problem with using non-descriptive types in these cases is that nobody else will know what these relations or associations actually represent. If you step away from the entries for a couple of years, you may not even remember why you structured things the way you did or what your thought process was at the time. A separate note containing this information can easily become an orphaned note, disconnected from relevant context.
From what I have read and heard about concubines, they are different from a “sister wife” (I understand what you mean—I believe Mormons use that term). As I understand it, “sister wife” and similar terms describe a wife on the same domestic hierarchical level, they all have the same social and legal rights and is officially married to the man, whereas a concubine is a woman of lower social status than the wives, but slightly higher than a servant or a slave.
Concubines could have both social and political power and influence (Oh yes, I have seen those Korean series… ), particularly if they bore children for a powerful man or were highly favored within the household. However, they remained hierarchically subordinate to the wives of the man they were concubines for, regardless of their level of influence.
), particularly if they bore children for a powerful man or were highly favored within the household. However, they remained hierarchically subordinate to the wives of the man they were concubines for, regardless of their level of influence.