Why have a parent?

Question

As part of some profile entries based on censuses that I've been making, I have several groups of siblings. But if I try to make them siblings WT insists on having Unknown as a father. I have no idea who that person was. But it shows up in my Suggestions as an empty profile. Surely it is not in WT's interests to have such profiles.

Answer 1

It is listed as an empty profile because someone removed the headers (==Biography==, etc) from the biography/sources box. It has nothing to do with the surname.

I have added the headers back.

Comments

I've added his given name and some sources.

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In my experience, when you add a sibling to someone who has no parents, Wikitree creates a father profile without any headings for the unknown father. I always have to add the headings in manually in these instances.

Answer 2

It won't be empty much longer.  I have done some research and found a name.  However, WT seems to be much more about families being linked together, rather than a large collection of unlinked individuals.

Comments

OK thanks. But that wasn't really the point. I could have found that, but it wasn't of any interest to the research I'm doing. That is about families, but only starting from 1851.

I think the answer is that I shall continue as is, but leave the odd ones as orphans. If anyone wants to develop them, fine.

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That is a very bad idea. If you do not wish to do the research necessary to connect these families (at the very least to parents) then please do not create them. Creating and abandoning profiles without dates, connections, names, sources, or headers is irresponsible and creates massive amounts of extra work for your fellow WikiTreers. I urge you to reconsider your approach.

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Sorry Deb, you misunderstand. I am not abandoning profiles.

Answer 3

Because Wikitree is about creating one big tree, collaboratively.

Answer 4

It is actualy quite logical. If you create siblings, the very nature of them being siblings, means that they must have a common parent, so WT creates one for you, Father by default.

Comments

That is what seems strange to me. Still if they want Unknowns ......

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its not about wanting or not wanting unknowns...

WikiTree relationships only exist through parent-child relationships (and spouse relationships, but those are in a separate database).

so, there's no way to connect siblings without a parent. If you insist on creating a sibling relationship (since there's a link), it will fabricate an unknown parent, if not already connected to one.

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Thank you. That makes sense at last.

Answer 5

Only parents and spouses are stored.

For children, it shows you "profiles with this profile as a parent".

For siblings, it shows you "profiles with the same parent as this profile".

There's no other way to record a sibling relationship.