Families & Households
A household is who lives at one address. A family role says how a person relates to that household: Husband, Wife or Child.
There is deliberately no "head of household". One address can hold more than one family, and nobody needs nominating as its head.
Why this is harder than it looks
The portal gives each person one family. That single fact causes most of the trouble people report:
- Two different families can share a surname, so a surname is no evidence of anything.
- A wife who kept her name cannot sit in her husband's household without the record looking mixed — so she often ends up filed on her own.
- A married adult cannot be both a child in their parents' household and a spouse in their own.
- Several households really can share one address, and that is normal rather than a mistake.
So the portal never guesses a relationship from a surname or an address alone. It fills in only what a household states plainly, and says nothing about the rest.
Family roles that fill themselves in
Where a household answers plainly, the roles are set for you:
| The household | What is recorded |
|---|---|
| One surname, exactly two adults — one man, one woman | Husband and Wife |
| Anyone in the household recorded as a child by member type | Child |
| Two adults of different sex with children, surnames differ | Husband and Wife (likely) |
| Three or more adults, the oldest two of different sex with a generation below them who share their surname | Husband, Wife, and adult Children (likely) |
Anything less clear is left alone, with the reason recorded — "three adults here, and no clear generation between them", "could be a couple, could be flatmates". Four siblings in their twenties get no roles at all, because inventing a couple would be worse than silence.
A role somebody entered by hand is never contradicted.
Households split into two records
The commonest data problem, and it takes several shapes:
- a married couple entered as two one-person families,
- one person split off from their parents and siblings,
- a surname typed two ways, so nothing groups the records together.
People & families → Families → Review duplicates groups these and — this is the part that matters — ranks them by whether anything agrees beyond what grouped them. Sharing a surname is not evidence. Sharing an address is not evidence. What counts is agreement that would not happen by chance: the same address and the same surname, a shared email, the same person appearing in both, or two surnames a typo apart at one address.
Groups that share only a surname, or only an address, are collapsed out of the way and labelled as such. They are usually right as they are.
Addresses
An address lives on the household. If a family record has none but its members do — and they agree — the household takes theirs. The reverse also holds. Where the two disagree nothing is changed and the disagreement is reported, because a person really can live somewhere other than their family's address.
Coordinates for the map are looked up from the address. Where a postcode already answers the question, no lookup is made at all.