In country and bluegrass music it is not uncommon to have personal relationships that extend beyond “married”, “sibling”, “children”. There are extended musical families, with uncle, aunt, cousin, Niece, nephew, great uncle, and the list goes on.
I am currently working with one of these that has uncle and great uncle. What is the policy around this type of linking? Is there a way to effectively show this or is this considered “too personal”.
You can add missing “link” family members to fill in the gaps between “more distant” family members; see e.g.,
She’s only in the db to provide family/personal relations linking a number of other artists.
I think I understand, but I do not like putting a “placeholder” in the database that has no musical connection other than being “involved with”, it seems “too” personal. I would also need to find out who that “involved with” person is, I’m not sure that is fair to them.
If you don’t want to add non-musical family, no one will force you to do it. So, really, there is no reason to discuss it any further. However…
just for the sake of conversation…
It was explained to me that it is ok to make one level of non-musical entries.
So, John the musician gets added. His non musical father gets added so that we can connect John to his musical grandfather.
In theory, if you add a musical person and his non musical father. Then you add a musical great grandfather and add a non musical son, you could connect the father and son to make it a great grandfather connection. But I don’t do that unless it is, like you said, a musical family. In fact, I inadvertently did it once because I was adding a huge multi-generational musical family and was adding the one layer of non musicians and realized that I could now connect more people based on 1-degree of separation in both directions instead of just one.
But here is how you can justify to yourself about “stealing anonymity” from a non-public figure…
If there is no print/site that states a name of the person, you don’t know who to add. So, basically, the only reason you know that Jane Smith is John Smith’s daughter is because somehow it became public knowledge, therefore it is public information.
And, on the opposite end, you can add something like this -
Her identity has not been discovered, but was needed to connect two people
As to your specific “uncle” example…
My father’s brother is my uncle. MB doesn’t have an Uncle/Nephew option, but it does have a father and brother option.
And if the relationships get to far down the family tree to connect them, you can add it as an annotation.
Well with minimal research I found the connection (the mother) and everything was discussed on their website so I was not intruding. Still have not finished all the connections as it is a tree with many branches working down to children and grandchildren and up to uncles and great uncles. Everyone including the parents and grandparents were into music.
Would it be possible to add more options, including grandchild? I’d like to link the entries for Joseph Kamaru as grandchild / grandfather A tale of two Kamarus
Can you link examples (MB artists)?
I fear that, if we have both parents and grandparents relationships, it could lead to redundant multiple relationships and unnecessary endless cleanups.
It would be better to find the intermediate parent to link the grandchildren to the grandparent.
You can always use a [Joseph Kamaru’s mother] (or father) kind of name.
We have a “step” checkbox for parent relationship that turns it to “is the step-parent of”.
We could have a “grand” checkbox, as well, maybe…