Proper definitions of mother-in-law and sister-in-law relationships in English and their calculation in Gramps

[petr_fedorov]

Hello!

Since I’m not a native speaker of English I would like to confirm that my understanding of terminology for basic in-law relationships in English is correct. This is related to the bug I recently filled as described below.

I found the following definitions in Merriam-Webster dictionary:

and

Collins dictionary defines mother-in-law similarly to Merriam-Webster, but gives a restricted definition of sister-in-law (note that 2b definition found in Merriam-Webster is not given by Collins):

Now consider the family lines graph below created from Example database:

If we set Lessard, Elinor Jane as Home Person and ask what kind of relationship exists between her and another persons (Quick View→Relation to Home Person) we get the following results:

1. Page, Clara Belle is ‘mother-in-law’
2. Klein, Alma Katherine is ‘mother-in-law’
3. Черных, Mary Helen is ‘sister-in-law’

Taking the above definitions we see that 1. is a correct relationship according to both dictionaries, 2. is a wrong relationship according to both dictionaries and, finally, 3. is correct according to Merriam-Webster and wrong according to Collins.

I recently filled the bug 14309 regarding 2. above with the intention to fix it. But before that I would like to receive a confirmation from Gramps community that my understanding is correct.

Thanks in advance for your feedback !

[emyoulation]

So, you want the calculator to identify them as “stepmother-in-law” and “spouse of halfsister-in-law”?

Although the relationship for Klein, Alma Katherine could be more complicated. If the father was widowed, then she is almost never be referred to as a “step”. But rather, as the “father-in-law’s late 1st wife”.

And socially, it is often considered rude (or discriminatory) to point out that a relationship is anything but biological. Even though it remains genetically important.

[petr_fedorov]

@emyoulation

So, you want the calculator to identify them as “stepmother-in-law” and “spouse of halfsister-in-law”?

It is possible and rather easy to do. I estimate implementation difficulties of the various options as follows:

• Easy: ‘stepmother-in-law’, ‘stepsister-in-law’

• Moderate: ‘father-in-law’s wife’, ‘brother–in-law’s wife’

• Difficult: ‘father-in-law’s late 1st wife’, ‘spouse of half brother-in-law’

I would definitely implement the Easy option, if it was an acceptable one, would think about the Moderate one and would think twice whether to implement the Difficult one

[emyoulation]

From the diagram, that is a half-sister, not a step-sister.

Whoops… wife of a half-brother‐in-law
.

[petr_fedorov]

Here is the description of the proposed changes. Please let me know what do you think.

Column Current in the table below shows how Gramps 6.0.6. reports the relationship between Persons B and A (Quick View->Relation to Home Person) and column Proposed - how the relationship will be reported in the future. An empty field in the Proposed column implies that no change will be made.

Seq.	Person (A)	Person (B)	Current	Proposed
1.	Lessard, Elinor Jane	Warner, Michael Warren	brother-in-law
2.	Lessard, Elinor Jane	Черных, Mary Helen	sister-in-law	wife of brother-in-law
3.	Lessard, Elinor Jane	Warner, Martin Bogarte	father-in-law
4.	Lessard, Elinor Jane	Page, Clara Belle	mother-in-law
5.	Lessard, Elinor Jane	Klein, Alma Katherine	mother-in-law	wife of father-in-law

I attach here the same graph as above for convenience

All of the above relationships are handled by single method: RelationshipCalculator.get_single_relationship_string(), even rows 1. and 2.

RelationshipCalculator.get_sibling_relationship_string() is not called for ‘in-law’ relationships at all by QuickView plugin.

I would propose to leave this ‘as-is’ since many rel_xx.py localizations implement get_sibling_relationship_string() method and at the moment it is not clear whether they are prepared to handle ‘in-law’ relationships between siblings properly. This implies that we can’t currently implement that Черных, Mary Helen is the ‘wife of a half-brother‐in-law’