I’ve been trying out several different genealogy software since the new year to see any worth using. I saw a nice feature with Heredis 2021. They add symbols to persons to indicate if a line is a dead end so you don’t keep looking after determining there are no records available. Also a way to indicate that an individual never married or a couple never had children. Also have relationships display similar to way Family Historian show families. For me the relationship view can be confusing due to the clutter.
There is a built-in ‘Other’ event type named “Number of Marriages”. But I don’t like using it because it is not explicitly for indicating bachelor or spinster. And the other place to add a parameter is in the Description… which is a string rather than a number field.
So I added a Custom Event type called “Never Married”.
Likewise, a custom type “End of Line” serves the other purpose.
I did a little bit of research into how to signify “no children” in gramps (for similar reasons that you note) and posted on the (old) gramps list. The posting (with my question and conclusion and several useful postings from others) can be found here:
http://gramps.1791082.n4.nabble.com/Representing-no-children-on-a-family-td4688607.html
Hope you may find some of it useful.
I have two tags for this:
- no children for a family (green)
- single for one person (purple)
It’s easy in the graphview view to see where are the dead end lines
here is an example:
Whatever the symbols are, how Heredis know it’s a dead end? Is it Heredis or its user which know that and decide to put some visual symbol?
If the user decides, you have the same options using Gramps tags, attributes or other options you can decide to use. (Heredis don’t have tagging option like gramps have, so they make their users pay for some flags like this)
If not what is your confidence with a system which could decide things for you in your genealogy?
About the subject itself, how to represent proofs that a person has not had children, that she/he has never been married; if you’ve found proofs of that, you could use a citation associated to an attribute for children or an event number of marriage. And about dead end: what is it about? If it’s something you decide not to search for anymore, you could simply tag it “no more research”.
I also use tags to signify “End of Lines” to signify that it is a line I have traversed and either found no indication that with my current research that parents are indicated. I also tend to leave tags or bookmarks on lines that I need to return to as “current research”, or disputed research that needs to be investigate further. I would also say it is a good way to signify things like no children, or other things of significance to aid your organization and efforts…
I then also have a way to quickly find the end of last known relative to see if anyone has found any hints to be followed up with to double check my trees.