If you run a programme that records something different for each person in a family, a shirt size, a shoe size, a gift request, this is the change you have been waiting for.
The details step now starts with the family you already have. Previously, attaching a family to a service that records details per person took you to a screen that asked who was in the family and offered empty First Name and Last Name boxes, for people you had created a minute earlier. Whatever you did next was wrong. Skipping left the record with nobody on it. Filling it in created a second copy of children the app was already holding, as plain text with no connection to their records.
Now the step lists everyone in the family by name, head first, ready for you to fill in. Nobody retypes a name. Each set of details belongs to a real person, which means you can follow the same child across two years of a programme for the first time.
Correcting a family's details is safe now. The Edit details panel used to open empty for any family you had entered by hand, and saving from there replaced the whole list. A family of five could become a family of one, with a success message and no warning. It now opens on the whole family with whatever was recorded already filled in, tells you how many people the save will list, and names anyone you are about to take off the record before you save. Saving updates the grid, the panel and the family's own page straight away.
If someone is not on file, you can still list them. Type their name on the row. It stays a name on that one record and does not create a person, which is exactly how the public registration form has always worked and continues to work.
Records made before this change are untouched. They display exactly as they did, and nothing has been rewritten.
A family's page stops claiming more than it knows. The services a family has received used to be captioned as who was in the family at the time, over a roster that might have been typed ninety seconds ago, sitting just below a members list showing different people. The caption is gone and the names come from the people's own records, so the two halves of the page agree.
Deleting a person works, or tells you something you can act on. Three fixes here. A person who headed a family you had already deleted could not be removed by any means the product offered, and the message told you to delete a family that was already gone. That is fixed: deleting the family now genuinely releases them. A refused deletion no longer shows a success message anywhere, on the profile page, the people list or the dashboard. And when a deletion is refused, you are told why, in words that name something you can actually do.