Skeleton-link protection

When you add a relative, Linea Codex opens a starter record — a skeleton — for the new person, already wired into your tree. That wiring is the point: the skeleton arrives with an identifier reserved for the new person and a family link connecting them to the relative you started from. Skeleton-link protection guards exactly those managed pieces while you flesh out the rest of the record, so an in-progress edit can’t quietly sever the connection that made the new person part of your tree.

What’s protected

While you’re filling in a new relative’s skeleton, two things are managed for you and must stay intact:

• The record’s identifier — the cross-reference (@I42@, say) reserved for the new person on the top line. It’s allocated automatically so it won’t collide with an existing record.
• The family link — the pointer that ties the new person to a family: FAMS when you’re adding a spouse, FAMC when you’re adding a son or daughter. This is the line that makes the relationship real, and it points at the family record the Add relative operation will create or reuse.

Everything else in the skeleton is yours to edit freely — name, sex, dates, and any other detail you want to add. Only the identifier and the managed family link are held.

What happens if you touch them

If an edit breaks one of those managed pieces — changing or retagging the identifier, repointing or retagging the family link, deleting the link line, or shifting it to the wrong level — the editor marks the line with an error and tells you why:

• For the identifier: This record’s identifier is assigned automatically and can’t be changed here.
• For the family link: This family link is managed automatically and can’t be changed or removed here.

While that error stands, Apply is disabled — you can’t commit a skeleton whose link is broken. Put the managed line back the way it was and Apply becomes available again (assuming you’ve still got other changes to apply). In short: you can edit everything around the links, but you finish the relative with its connection intact, or not at all.

Only while building a new relative

This protection is specific to the create-a-relative skeleton — it’s there to stop a half-built person from being orphaned before you’ve even saved them. It is not a general lock on cross-references in ordinary records. Once the new person is applied and is a normal record in your tree, their pointers are just regular GEDCOM you can edit like any other.

Changing a relationship later

To actually change who’s related to whom — move a child to a different family, correct a spouse link — edit the relevant FAMC / FAMS and HUSB / WIFE / CHIL pointers on the finished records, or rebuild the relationship through Adding relatives. Skeleton-link protection isn’t in your way there; it only applies to a relative you’re in the middle of creating.

---

Next: commit your edits, revert them, and step backward and forward — Apply, discard & undo →.