A family tree with a second marriage

What goes wrong in most family-tree apps

In FamilySearch, Ancestry and MyHeritage, someone who married twice has one “preferred” spouse or set of parents, and the main pedigree and fan views follow that one line (Ancestry’s vertical family view can list every spouse). The other wife or husband, and their children, are still in the record, but they are often off the drawing. For the family it can look as if they were removed. A half-brother opens the tree and cannot find himself.

The usual workarounds are worse: adding the second marriage as a note, drawing two separate trees, or leaving the first marriage out “for now”.

How Bargad draws it

Vikram married Meera and had Aarav and Riya; later he married Anita and had Kabir. Both wives sit beside him, each child hangs under their own two parents, and the three children are drawn as what they are: brother and sisters with one parent in common. An ended marriage is drawn with a dashed line, so the tree also says that it ended, without dropping anyone.

Nothing is “preferred”. Each person who opens the tree sees it from their own place: to Kabir, Riya is a half-sister; to Meera’s side of the family, Vikram’s second marriage is there but out of the way. Relation names follow the same rule, in English or Hindi (a half-brother is still bhai).

Step-children, adoption and guardians

A step-child is a child of your spouse from an earlier marriage: they appear under their own parents, next to yours, and are labelled step-son or step-daughter from your side. Adopted and foster children, and children raised by a guardian, are linked to the parents who raised them, with the kind of link kept on the card so the tree never pretends otherwise.

Second marriages in famous families

Saif Ali Khan’s two marriages, with Sara and Ibrahim from the first and Kareena’s sons from the second, sit side by side in the Pataudi family tree. The Mughal family tree shows emperors with several wives at once, each with her own children.

Bringing an existing tree

If your tree is already in another app, download its GEDCOM file and open it here. Every marriage in the file is kept, including the ones the other app was hiding, and the drawing shows them at once. Or start from your own name: your parents’ and grandparents’ names are enough to begin, and each marriage is added to the person it belongs to.