When a woman has multiple marriages, according to geni.com, her first husband is called the step-father of the children of her subsequent marriages and they are called his step-sons and step-daughters.
My first reaction would be that these relationships should be called first-husband-of-mother and son/daugher-of-wife-by-subseqent-marriage, or something along those lines.
Robert - Can you link me to a profile where you're seeing this behavior? I'd like to take a look and see who is listed as the fathers of the children, etc.
We used to use strict rules for whom we labeled a "step-" family member, according to our understanding of how these terms are used in the U.S. We had quite a few users express dismay over our strict rules, telling us that "step" is used differently in different cultures, and that they wanted the flexibility to apply the label more broadly. As a result, we broadened our rules to label all partners of parents as step parents, and all of their children from other marriages as step siblings. You can remove the "step" label from these profiles by clicking the "Edit" link to the right of the Immediate Family module header on the Overview tab, and hiding the unwanted steps from the immediate family group.
I understand the difficulty of relationship terms having different meanings in different cultures.
I think the work-around of simply removing the person from the Immediate Family group is acceptable for the situation I had with my tree.
However, I have a suggestion for a future enhancement to geni.
In cases where a relationship-name (e.g., step-father) is used in place of a longer chain (.e.g, mother's first husband), I would like to see the option to locally disable the use of the short-hand relationship-name, causing the longer chain of relationships to appear instead.
I guess that if step-daughter were "disabled" in this way (for a particular individual relationship) you'd see "wife's daughter via 2nd husband".
Hello Natalie and Mike! Thank you for the comment on this discussion: http://www.geni.com/discussions/108157 I understand that there is different usages of the term step-father/mother/children..
But when a son dies before his father is married to the one called step-mother, is it usual to call his fahers new wife step-mother?
In my case my second great-grandfather married first in 1892, got three children, this wife died in 1897. He married second in 1899, got five children. This wife died in 1928.
He married third in 1930. The children of his first wife died 1922, 1929 and 1932. All of his children is called stepchildren of his third wife....
How do I find this "Family module header?" I dont want to disconnect anything, so can you explain how I "hide" the stepmother Andrea in this profile: http://www.geni.com/people/Ingward-Adulf-Howden/6000000014176684718?through=6000000013601834945 and the stepchildren: Ole, Ingward and Conrad in this: http://www.geni.com/people/Andrea-Garshol/6000000014176684708?through=6000000014027081381
I only became a basic member due to the step father thing. I felt it was totally wrong because people do not know how these step-father/daughter relationships can be so embarrassing to some, for instance if a step father was abusive in many ways to his step children. Definitely they do not WANT to see it in writing that they are in any way related even if their mother was stupid enough to marry the guy and have children. There has to be a way of separating families in the order they are made.