half-siblings with 3 different fathers, 2 unknown

Question

I have a female ancestor who has children with her husband, as well as a child (labeled "Illegitimate" in church records) born prior to her marriage, and a child born 5 years after she was widowed.  The first (pre-marriage) child, and the post-marriage child both have unknown fathers, and as they are 16 years apart, probably NOT the SAME unknown father.  However, since I can't put a name to either unknown father to differentiate, WIKITREE assumes the two children are full siblings, rather than half siblings.  Is there a way to manually change the labeling for these two siblings to reflect their more likely relationship to each other as half siblings, or do I have to leave it that way, and add a note in the biography section?  They each show as half-siblings to the children from the marriage, but don't show as half-siblings to each other.

Comments

I have the same situation, and nobody could give me a solution.

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If the last names of the 'half siblings' are the same, the biography should state it for sure.  You never know with 16 years apart of who the fathers could be. They could be the same father since the mother married in the middle.

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With my lot it would be impossible for first child and last child to have the same father.  They also have different last names, yet show as full siblings.

It would be nice to have them seen as half-sibs, instead of full sibs, because any explanation is on the mother's profile, not theirs.

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Melanie, why not create a father for one of those siblings with unknown name?  That would make them half siblings at least.

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Because the UNKNOWN project leader would probably have my hide! 

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Melanie, any complaints about creating an Unknown profile as a placeholder would be pure hypocrisy because this is precisely what the WikiTree system does automatically when you add a sibling to a profile that does not have parents' profiles.

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Cheryl or Melanie, Did you ever come up with a good solution for this. I have the same situation. First child born with mother's maiden name but assumed husbands name later for all life, put it in as 'current' name, perhaps if I took that out it might help, or moved it to 'other last names'. hmmmm. (later, nope, doesn't!) What to do??

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Nope.  The child born to an unknown father several years before the woman married still shows as full-sib to the child born to an unknown father some years after the husband died.
Both those children correctly show as half-sibs to the children of the marriage.

Added to that for my lot is that the before-marriage child and the after-marriage child were born not only a decade and more apart, they were born an ocean apart.  Plus the after-marriage (and well past the death of husband) child was also born in a different state from where the family lived.  (Mama was trying to "cover up her sins".)

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I've asked it again. Maybe someone will CREATE a way to fix this! thx

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I ended up creating a semi-fictitious father profile for the oldest child who had his mother's maiden name as his surname, and I flagged it in caps/asterisks in the bio that there is probably no such person  That child's death record many years later had (presumably erroneously on the part of his heirs doingvthe paperwork) indicated his father as Andrew (his stepfather Andrew Bubacz's first name) Osinski (his mother's maiden name, and the surname he used throughout his own life).  There is no such person from what I 've been able to tell. And I used that death record as the source for this fictitious profile.  No one has raised concerns about it to date.  The children now appear as half siblings to each other.

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Gaile - not any longer, and even "back then" it did not.
It would create an Unknown Known-last-name profile to link two siblings without a known parent, but who shared a last name.  (I believe now you actually need at least one date before the unknown father profile can be created, but I'm sure someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that one).

I will not add to the Unknown-##### problem by creating a fictional person.  Apart from the unknown factor, that goes against the Honor Code.
If I had even the slightest idea who either one of the unknown fathers MIGHT be, I would consider creating a profile based on that, but in neither case is there even a HINT regards the men involved.

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Melanie, forgive me - I did not intend to suggest that you do it, merely pointing out the hypocrisy of anyone complaining about it being done.

If the system stopped doing that, it's great news, however "back then" it did a pretty terrible thing.  If you added a sibling to a parentless profile, it created a father with first name Unknown.  If the sibling had the same LNAB as the original profile then it gave the father that LNAB, otherwise it assigned Unknown as the father's LNAB also.  Other than the connections to the two children, the father's profile was completely blank ... and I *do* mean completely - it didn't even have the Biography and Sources headings!  Finally, rubbing salt in the wound, the person who created the sibling was given credit for having created the father's profile, made manager of it, but never informed that this had happened.  It took a line in your feed showing that a data doctor had added Biography and Source headings and the <references /> line for you to discover this profile that was a very big embarrassment to have been accorded responsibility for.

If the only change is to require a date, that isn't much of an improvement the way we're encouraged to estimate birth as "before" 20 (or whatever) years earlier than birth of earliest known child.

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I know about that embarrassment!  It was one of my earliest questions on g2g (and you were one who responded) — https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/709559/adding-sibling-profile-caused-another-profile-unknown-created

(I don't even remember which was the profile so created, but I DO remember the horror with which I viewed the event!)

Answer 1

You said you don't know the fathers.  Do both children have their mother's name?  If one or both have their father's last name, then you could create an 'Unknown' with one of the father's last name.  That would then create them as half-sibling, but currently they are full siblings because they have the same parents, even if it is one parent.