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I’m looking for a “better” way of noting kids born illegitimately (Royals, not my personal family tree). We’ve adapted a custom tag for common law marriage because of confines of GEDCOM but aside from that route, what suggestions do you have?

I’ve been mostly noting in the via the source but not consistently and not same wording. I want something to the short and sweet 2 TYPE “illegitimate” effect.

----- [updated: 31Aug2023]

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An interesting issue. The “normal” method is to add the father (King) and mother with the child as a family unit, but with a _NMR (not married) tag and leave the “illegitimacy” as assumed. But I can see why in your cases you might want some additional specificity.

There is the PEDI tag that can be included with birth, but the purpose of that is well defined in GEDCOM as “A code used to indicate the child to family relationship for pedigree navigation purposes.“. The only options GEDCOM lists for that are adopted | birth | foster | sealing. To be fair though “rada” was added to webtrees for use in some (one?) culture.
However, the key in the designation of PEDI is in the word “navigation” which is different to your purpose, I believe. Certainly using PEDI in this case, as kiwitrees currently uses it would not designate anything useful for you. Your PEDI, if used at all, should still be “birth”, but then needs a further classification to “illegitimate”.

What you are looking for is simply a qualifier to the BIRTh event. In which case the 2 TYPE you refer to is the correct solution.

The TYPE sub-tag is well described in the GEDCOM spec. and certainly does fit your needs:

EVENT_OR_FACT_CLASSIFICATION:=
A descriptive word or phrase used to further classify the parent event or attribute tag. This should be
used whenever either of the generic EVEN or FACT tags are used. The value of this primitive is
responsible for classifying the generic event or fact being cited. For example, if the attribute being
defined was one of the persons skills, such as woodworking, the FACT tag would have the value of
‘Woodworking’, followed by a subordinate TYPE tag with the value ‘Skills’.
1 FACT Woodworking
2 TYPE Skills
This groups the fact into a generic skills attribute, and in particular this entry records the fact that this
individual possessed the skill of woodworking. Using the subordinate TYPE tag classification method
with any of the other defined event tags provides a further classification of the parent tag but does not
change the basic meaning of the parent tag. For example, a MARR tag could be subordinated with a
TYPE tag with an EVENT_DESCRIPTOR value of ‘Common Law.’
1 MARR
2 TYPE Common Law
This classifies the entry as a common law marriage but the event is still a marriage event. Other
descriptor values might include, for example,`stillborn’ as a qualifier to BIRTh or ‘Tribal Custom’ as a
qualifier to MARRiage.

It’s a free-form text field, not limited to any set of entries, so it cannot be translated, and you would need to be consistent in it’s use (including capitalisation).
I am reluctant to extend it’s “official use to the BIRT event, as it would. I feel, cause confusion between it and the PEDI tag for many people. In fact I suspect it could result in the PEDI tag never being used again! But I’m happy for a wider discussion on this, and if it’s a popular request it’s a very easy change. We currently only include TYPE on EVEN, FACT, GRAD, IDNO, MARR, ORDN, and SSN tags.

Meanwhile you have two ways to use it your self:

1. You could use “Edit Raw GEDCOM data” and add “2 TYPE Illegitimate” in the BIRT event of the child’s record, or
2. You could modify the code (very slightly) to include TYPE in all BIRTh edit screens.

For option 2, just open /includes/config_data.php and at around line 237 add ‘BIRT’, to the end of the TYPE array to have this:

	‘TYPE’=>array(
		‘EVEN’,
		‘FACT’,
		‘GRAD’,
		‘IDNO’,
		‘MARR’,
		‘ORDN’,
		‘SSN’,
		‘BIRT’,
	),

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

I tried to Google use of 2 TYPE with BIRTH but wrong phrase and didn’t find results. You’ve answered my questions about it. Think I’ll go this route. It’s crazy tracking the kids! Between the wives and mistresses, these guys kept busy (so too the women, as they took lovers 🙂

I like option 2. Will implement after the next release and my trial period in getting comfortable with changes. Timing is perfect as by then I’ll be ready to add records (still modifying existing).

I concur that it should not be a change to kiwitrees as you mention. I’ll have the option for new records I add and do modification to existing when I’m at the record anyway.

I stopped using PEDI back in PGV when as a newcomer, thought it was mandatory. So will skip this option.

----- [updated: 31Aug2023]

 Alter-Drukarsh connections |The Garelicks|Journal 3.3.12 -  PHP Version 8.1.17 - mySQL 8.1
The Royals |The Kennedys|The Gerrer Rabbis  3.3.12 -  PHP Version 8.1.17 - mySQL 8.1