The census record below shows Kristjan Peter Madsen and his family in the 1890 Denmark census. In the household are his wife and two sons, but there is also another child, Jens Peter Jensen, who is designated as a plejebarn (foster child).
When I find a plejebarn in a family, I generally try to find that child's birth record. Often these children are relatives of other members of the household (for example, if a woman had a child out of wedlock and didn't marry the father, her parents would take in the child). So finding these children can give me more information about other members of the family.
The census record says Jens Peter Jensen was born in Horby parish and he is age three, so with that information I was able to find his birth record. Here is the left page:
By the way, Kr. Peter Madsen is listed as one of the witnesses or godparents on the right page.
From this record I now have his birth date and I know that his mother was Johanne Marie Jensen of Faurholthuus. She is designated as Ugifte (single) and there is no father listed.
Recently I looked again at Jens Peter Jensen and noticed that another use had added a link to his marriage record (notice that Christian Peter Madsen is one of the witnesses):
So now the question is, where does Jens Peter Jensen belong on the Family Search Family Tree? I don't have enough information to figure out who his father is, and I also wasn't able to find much about his mother. When I was initially researching him I only had enough information to add him and his mother, so they would have been free floaters in the tree. In addition, he apparently had a close relationship with Kristian/Christian Peter Madsen's family because Christian was his godparent and a witness at his marriage. Jens was probably raised by Christian Peter Madsen and his wife Ane Margrethe Pedersen. So that foster child/parent relationship was probably important too, maybe even more important than his relationship with his biological parents.
In the end what I decided to do was give Jens Peter Jensen two sets of parents: his mother with an unknown father, and Christian Peter Madsen and Ane Margrethe Pedersen who were his foster or adoptive parents. To make it clear for other researchers why I did it this way, I added all my sources and explanations and edited the parent-child relationship so that it notes he is a foster child. Here is how you do that:
First, here is Jens Peter Jensen shown in Christian Peter Madsen's family with the note that his relationship with these parents is "Foster."
To change the parent relationship type, you click the gray icon to the right of the person's name (I think it's meant to be a pencil?).
When you click that icon, this screen appears:
For each parent you can click "Add Relationship Type" (in blue). When you do this a drop-down menu will appear and you can choose the type of relationship and give a reason the information is correct. The drop-down menu is hiding that there is also an option to add a date, which could be useful in many situations, such as if you have documentation of an adoption date or if you want to indicate how long a foster child lived with a family.
Next you can click save and repeat this for the other parent. Then when the child is shown in the list of children there will be a designation of their relationship type.
In the case of step parents, you could designate a parent-child relationship where one parent is the step parent and one is the biological parent.
I should note that this does make the ordinances available for the child to be sealed to those parents, and in fact somebody did reserve the sealing of Jens Peter Jensen to Christian Peter Madsen and Ane Margrethe Pedersen. Deceased people can be sealed to multiple sets of parents. Personally this doesn't bother me because I think God (and the Spirits whose temple work we perform) recognizes that we are imperfect and doing the best with the information we have. The way I see it, if someone is sealed to multiple sets of parents, that will be resolved at some point, and we're not going to be forced to be sealed to parents we don't want to be with. Maybe in this case Jens would prefer to be sealed to the parents who raised him, or maybe this is a blessing for him since without any information about his father he couldn't be sealed to his biological parents at all. I've also found that if we listen, sometimes we are able to get some communication from beyond the veil to help us decide what to do in these complicated situations.
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