Add households

[tbirrell]

One of the things I've noticed is that handling events, addresses, notes, pets, and a few other things is very inelegant when it comes to households.

For example, I have a friend who just got married. His wife still lived with her parents until their wedding. So upon marriage, I had to do several things. Update both of their addresses, add a life event for each. Remove a family pet from her profile and add his dog instead. Shortly thereafter they moved, which meant I had to go and update both addresses again, and add two more life events (one each), and leave an identical note on both accounts about the new place.

The only thing I did that was easy was changing their Love Relationship status from dating to married. Everything else had to done individually for each, which also means any change in the future that affects them as a couple, has to be synchronized to both. Or, for larger households, like with her old family pet, synchronized to a whole family (if I have multiple members in my DB) or group of roommates

So my suggestion is to implement an object called Households. It would be similar to tags, but if you added something to a person's account, you could click a checkbox that said "add for Household" or something, and it would be automatically duplicated for every other current member of the household. The reason it needs to be duplicated rather than assigned to the household and retrieved via a JOIN is for historical reasons. If someone leaves a household, I would still want to see all the life events and notes and other things that I had added.

This would be a large change, probably on par with Photos or Places. But I think it would be a good change, and definitely in line with the purpose of Monica. If this is something you are interested in pursuing, I have a few specific ideas that I can also share (though they may be more suited for a v2, after we get the initial idea up and running)

[djaiss]

I agree. See #1810. Definitely interesting to add.

[mccollam]

This would be very useful! I think it's worth considering the idea that someone could potentially be a member of more than one household. (An example would be a child with divorced parents. The child spends 50% of their time at each parent's house, so they are a member of each parent's household.)

I also added a list of various "family" types to consider to #1810 which might have some overlap.