Talk:half sibling-in-law

RFV discussion: March–August 2015
From Pass a Method. I see nothing usable for singular or plural in Google Books or Groups. Equinox ◑ 13:22, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
 * It appears in the US census data (185 people were recorded as "step/half sibling-in-law" in 1880, for instance). It also appears in the fine print of a few brochures for health insurance plans (eg "For purposes of this provision, “immediate family” means parents, spouse, children, siblings, half-siblings, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, half-sibling-in-law, or any relative by blood or marriage who shares a residence with you."), but I don't know how durably archived they are. Neither makes clear which of the definitions is meant, of course. Smurrayinchester (talk) 16:49, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Combining the senses would be trivially easy and possibly wise. I'd say US census records are durably archived to the same extent as medieval manuscripts, i.e. yes they could be destroyed by a fire, but we do cite them. Like manuscripts, copies have been made of them. But I don't know if they should be considered independent or not; I suppose it would depend on whether the term "half sibling-in-law" was supplied by the government as a possibility (in which case 185 instances of it are not independent) or whether it was supplied independently to the government by 185 independent people. Of course, it would be preferable to find other places where the term is also used. - -sche (discuss) 08:41, 16 July 2015 (UTC)


 * RFV-failed. The one census result which turns up after a Google Scholar search for this phrase is, strictly speaking, "step/half sibling-in-law". The other result, 1987 Summer, C Loftin, K Kindley, SL Norris, B Wiersema, An attribute approach to relationships between offenders and victims in homicide, in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, volume:78, issue 2, is actually "half sibling" and "in law" as two separate and merely adjacent items in a list of kinship relationships. - -sche (discuss) 23:23, 1 August 2015 (UTC)