• Adding a Person
• Deleting a Person
• Setting the Spouse

Adding a Person

People are added to the Genealogy Pro database using the "Family" menu.

Firstly, select a person by clicking in a row of that person. It doesnt matter whether the view is the Family browser or the Individuals' browser or even a Chart window. People are added to the Genealogy Pro database using the "Family" menu. The family menu is shown below.

For example, when "Family⇒New Son" menu item was clicked and David Mitford was the currently selected person in the Individuals browser. The image below shows that a new person has been created. The surname for the new person has been copied from the selected parent. The first name is by defaul "Son of ..." where ... is the name of the selected parent (in this case, David). There is no special linking of the name of the new person with the parent name. It is simply initialised by default to the name of the parent and can be changed at any time using the name editor.

When a new person is created, the first and/or surname is usually altered to the desired name using the Genealogy Pro Editor.

Deleting a Person

People are deleted from the database the selecting the person and then choosing the "Delete" item from the "Family" menu.

In any genealogy database, all individuals are usually related somehow. Deleting individuals will therefore often leave a gap. In Genealogy Pro 1.0 this was prevented by only allowing deletion of lineages, that is, deletion of the person required deletion of all descendants. In the production version of Genealogy Pro 2.0, you are allowed to delete any individual. However, you should do so sparingly to avoid 'gaps' in the databae. A general rule of thumb for deleting individuals is:

• Where a person has no descendants, a simple deletion is the default behaviour.

• Where a person has one or more descendants, you have the choice, in a dialog window, to choose whether to delete the individual or all descendants. The usual choice will be to delete all descendants.

• Where a person has one or more descendants, but has no parents, you are give the choice to delete the individual or all descendants. Often the desired result in this case is to delete the individual and not the descendants.

If you choose to delete descendants,the offspring and all descendants of the offspring will also be deleted. Genealogy Pro will giving a warning prior to any deletion occurring, including an estimated count of the number of descendats that will be deleted.

Setting the Spouse

The "Family⇒Set Spouse" function enables you to designate a person who currently exists in the database as a spouseto the selected person. This function should be used rarely, if at all.

The only time in which this function should be used is when

• Cousins marry - in which case the cousins already created and put into the database in their respective families, require the "Set Spouse" function to tell Genealogy Pro that the cousins are spouses of each other or
• There are a number of genealogical lines in the database and the lines overlap at more than one point (eg two brothers of one line married to two sisters of another family).