Relationships¶

A relationship connects two people in your family history. Without relationships, people are just isolated names — with relationships, a tree emerges.

PastPaths handles four types of relationships: parent–child, partner, sibling, and other relations (godparent, witness, and similar). Based on the direct relationships you register, indirect kinship (e.g. grandfather, cousin, brother-in-law) is calculated automatically in the family tree.

Relationship types¶

Parent–child¶

Registered as a directed link from parent to child. A person can have several parents of different types:

Biological parent
Adoptive parent
Foster parent
Step-parent
Legal guardian

In the relationship dialog, choose Parent when the person you're adding is the parent of the person you're on, and Child when the person you're adding is the child. So you can register a parent–child relationship from either person's page.

Direction matters

The relationship always points from parent to child. If you accidentally reverse it — for example by choosing Parent when you meant Child — PastPaths warns about an impossible age order.

An adoption can also be registered as an event of the type Adoption, with the child as the primary person and the adoptive parents with the role Parent. The event holds the date, place, and sources of the adoption. You register the parent relationship (Adoptive parent) as usual.

Partner¶

Registered as a mutual relationship. You choose the form in a menu:

Married
Engaged
Cohabiting
Living apart together
Partner — they were together but the form is unknown, for example after an import
Other

A couple has one relationship, and the form shows the current state. If an engaged or cohabiting couple marries, the relationship becomes married, and the engagement or moving in together is kept as history. The dialog shows it under the date, for example "Earlier: Engagement 1849".

Dates can be entered as a year (1850), a year and month (1850-07), or a full date (1850-07-14), and are shown with the precision you entered — "1850" is shown as 1850, not as January 1, 1850.

The relationship and the events¶

Married, engaged, and cohabiting start with an event: a marriage, an engagement, or moving in together. The event owns the date and place, and the relationship shows the event's date. The relationship and the events are linked both ways:

From the relationship: when you save the relationship, the event is created with both as primary persons. If the couple already has such an event, it's linked instead, so the same marriage is never registered twice. The date and place in the dialog are written to the event. The Linked event button opens it.
From the event: if you register a marriage, engagement, moving in together, divorce, or separation with the couple as primary persons or spouses, it's linked to the couple's relationship. If the couple has no relationship, one is created. A marriage turns an engagement, a cohabitation, or a partnership into married.
If you change the date of the event, the relationship's date follows.
Marriage banns are linked to the couple's relationship as history but don't create a relationship.
Living apart together, partner, and other have no events and keep their own dates.

How the relationship ended¶

Tick The relationship has ended and choose How did it end?:

Divorce and Separation — have an event of their own, which is created or linked the same way as the marriage. Separation suits, for example, a cohabiting couple who moved apart.
Death — the end date is the date of death of the one who died first. The one who survived is shown as a widow or widower. The one who died first was married until their death and is shown as married.
Unknown — the relationship has ended but you don't know how.

A marriage that ended in divorce is still a marriage: the form is married and the end reason divorce. Ex-partner and widowed are therefore no longer forms of their own. Relationships registered that way were converted when the database was upgraded. The person page, the person dialog, and the family tree show how the relationship ended, for example divorced, widow, or former cohabitant.

When an event is deleted or changed¶

The event is the basis of the form. If it disappears, the relationship follows:

The start event (the marriage, or the engagement or moving in together that started the relationship) is deleted, changes type, or gets other participants: the relationship becomes partner without start and end dates and without an end reason. A divorce or separation is unlinked but kept. The relationship isn't deleted, since the couple may have been together anyway — for example if they had children together.
The divorce or separation is deleted: the relationship becomes ongoing again.
If the relationship has no event for its end, for example in older data, it keeps its own end date when you change the marriage.

When you delete such an event, the confirmation shows what happens to the relationship, with checkboxes to also delete the divorce and the relationship. → Delete an event

Sibling¶

Registered mutually — adding a sibling relationship automatically creates the link in both directions. The subtypes are:

Full sibling — sharing both parents
Half-sibling — sharing one parent
Step-sibling — sharing no biological parents

Other relations¶

For people who are connected in some other way than by kinship. The subtypes are:

Godparent
Witness
Other — it's a good idea to write in the note what the relation is about

An other relation has a direction: one person has the role (is the godparent or witness) and the other is the one the role applies to. In the relationship dialog, choose:

Other relation — the person you're adding has the role, e.g. is the godparent of the person you're on
Other relation – this person has the role — the person you're on has the role, e.g. is the godparent of the person you're adding

Other relations are shown on the person page, in the person dialog, and in the branch view in both directions, described with a full sentence — for example "Karl Svensson is the godparent of Anna Berg".

Other relation or role in an event?

You register an other relation directly between two persons. If the person was a witness at an event that's already registered, you can link them to the event with the role Witness instead — the link then shows up under Through events without you having to register a relationship. Both kinds can be shown in the family tree's network view.

Adding a relationship¶

Go to the person's page.
Click "+ Add relationship" in the relationships section.
Choose the relationship type and subtype.
Search for the other person.
Fill in dates if known.
Click Save.

You can also add parents, partners, children, siblings, and other relations directly in Research branch, where you can also create a new person and link them in the same step.

In the edit dialog¶

When you edit a person (the Edit person pencil), the Relationships section is at the bottom of the dialog. It works as in Research branch: each relationship type has an Add menu with Existing person and New person, and each row has a pencil and a trash can.

Existing person opens the relationship dialog, where you search among all persons in the database — by name, place, tag, or category.
New person lets you create the person first. Once it's saved, the relationship dialog opens with the new person preselected.
The Check column is shown as an icon: orange for a warning, gray if it's only information. Hover over the icon to read the text.

Relationships are saved immediately

Changes to relationships are saved the moment you save them in the relationship dialog — they don't wait for the edit dialog's Save button. If you click Cancel in the edit dialog, the relationship changes are still kept.

When you create a new person, the Parents, Partner, Siblings, and Children fields are in the form instead.

Partner and sibling relationships are saved twice

For partner and sibling relationships, an entry is automatically created in each direction. You only need to register the relationship once.

Edit and delete¶

Click the pencil next to an existing relationship to change the subtype (for partners: the form and how the relationship ended), dates, place, or note. The type and the person can't be changed on an existing relationship — to do that, remove the relationship and create a new one.

If you change the form of a married couple to a form without a marriage, for example to correct a mistake, the marriage is unlinked from the relationship but kept under Events.

If you change the subtype or dates, the relationship is checked the same way as when it was created (see Validation), and you may get a warning to confirm with Save anyway. If you only change the note, no check is made.

For partners and siblings, the change is saved in both directions, so both people show the same details. If the other direction has its own, different note, the texts are combined instead of one overwriting the other.

Choose the trash can to remove the relationship. The confirmation tells you what happens: the relationship and its own citations are removed, but the persons and their events, places, media, and blog posts are not affected.

If a partner relationship has events that belong only to it — the marriage, the divorce, and similar — they're shown in the confirmation with checkboxes. Tick the events to delete together with the relationship. The boxes are empty to start with, so nothing is deleted unless you choose it. The other events are kept under Events.

Deleting partner and sibling relationships

Deleting a partner or sibling relationship automatically removes both directions.

Notes on relationships¶

A note on a relationship belongs to the relationship itself — for example the marriage between two persons — not to either of the persons. It's shown directly under the person:

in the branch view (Research branch), with the full text
in the edit dialog
on the person page's Relationships tab
in the person panel that opens when you click a person in the family tree

In the edit dialog, on the person page, and in the family tree, at most two lines are shown; hover over the note to read the rest. Since the note belongs to the relationship, the same text is shown for both persons.

Validation¶

PastPaths checks every relationship when you save. The checks are divided into three levels:

Errors — block saving¶

These must be resolved before you can save:

Circular reference — e.g. A is a parent of B, who is a parent of A (an impossible ancestral line)
Mutual parenthood — A is already a child of B; B cannot then also be a child of A
Parent–child incest — a registered parent–child link prevents the same pair from being registered as partners

Warnings — require confirmation¶

Possible but unlikely situations. You can choose to save anyway by confirming:

Situation	Warning
The child is older than (or the same age as) the parent	Impossible age order
The parent was under 13 at the child's birth	Critical — check the dates
The parent was 13–15 at the child's birth	Unusually young
The parent was older than 60 (woman) / 70 (man) at the child's birth	Unusually old
The child was born more than 10 months after the parent's death	Check the dates
More than 2 biological parents registered	Check the subtype
More than 25 years' age difference between partners	Large age difference
Under 16 at the time of marriage	Young at marriage
Marriage dated before either partner's birth	Check the dates
Overlapping partnership periods	Possible bigamy or incorrect dating
Sibling relationship between partners	Possible inbreeding or data error
More than 30 years' age difference for siblings	Unusual age difference

Information — shown without restriction¶

Neutral notes that don't require action:

Posthumous child (born < 10 months after the parent's death) — biologically possible
Twins (same or nearly the same date of birth)
Sibling type doesn't match the registered parents (e.g. marked as full siblings but sharing only one parent)

Check all relationships¶

Under Administration → Maintenance → Relationships, you can check that the partner and sibling relationships hold together — that both directions have the same details, that no direction is missing, and that the subtype is valid. The check also finds exact copies of relationships, pairs with several different relationships between them (for example both married and siblings), and children with more than one biological mother or father.

For the partner relationships and their events, the check finds married couples without a marriage, relationships whose dates differ from the event, and marriages, divorces, and similar events that aren't linked to the couple's relationship — common in data from before the link existed. You see the result before anything is changed, and each fix has a button of its own and a confirmation that says what will be changed.

Children with more than one possible parent are often a sign that the same parent exists twice, for example after an import. There you can select the parents who are the same person and merge them directly — with the whole family in front of you. → Guide: Clean up after an import

Indirect kinship¶

PastPaths works out indirect kinship from the direct relationships you've entered: parent–child, partner, and sibling. The shortest path between two persons becomes a kinship term such as "grandfather", "uncle", "cousin", or "sister-in-law". When there's no term of its own, the path is written as a chain, for example "mother's brother's son".

The kinship isn't stored as separate relationships in the database. Currently, it's shown in the list of persons that can be included in the family tree's PDF export, where each person gets their relationship to the focus person.

Planned relationship types

Future versions plan to add support for additional direct relationship types: grandparent, aunt/uncle, and cousin. Godparent is already available as an other relation.