Families - suggested improvements

[hamishr]

I have only recently seriously started using the Family feature for People and like it very much. I especially like the fact that if a person belongs to multiple families, you can move from one family to the next by clicking on the icon for the family at the bottom of the displayed record for that person. This means that if a person is the husband/wife of one family, you can move up the "tree" to their childhood family and from there go to their father's or mother's childhood family, and so on. Very simple but powerful.

I do, however, have some suggestions for improvements of the Family feature.
1. As far as I am aware, I can't order people within a family. I would like to be able to put the parents at the top of the listed members of a family and the children in order of birth. This could be done by simply ordering by birth date for everyone.
2. To get the families ordered nicely, for the Family Name field I type in the Surname, the year of marriage, and the first names of the couple that head the family, e.g. "Driver 1919 - Owen and Elsie".  A nice-to-have would be new fields for exact date of marriage, and place of marriage. At present, I put this info into the Description field, which is OK but not ideal. This request links in with a previous request by another user for giving a date range for a family so that associated images for the family can be filtered to the date range. So maybe the best would be to have a begin date and an end date for the family and for each an optional text for the nature of the date (e.g. marriage, start of relationship, divorce, death of partner). If the text field were long enough, one could also use it for recording location description, e.g. "marriage, at St. John's Church, Newcastle."
3. As far as I can make out, you can't display the family Description info in the list of families and family members. It would be nice to add this in for the option where you display the full information for each family member.

Thank-you!