Maybe A Daft Question But...

[Just Kia]

In the end I chose to not add the names of children of females who married out of the family, but I do include them in the notes of the marriage/relationship to which they were born. I also include the names of the parents and siblings of the women who married into the family. I put this info in the notes of the the woman's birth entry.
That way the information is there, but the individuals are not included in any tree reconstruction. For me that fits the best of both worlds.

[Redroger]

.  I also have a number of smaller family groups of about three generations, some of them as old as the 15th century.

David

As an amateur archaeologist this reminds me of dendrochronology, reading the age of a sample of timber by counting the tree rings and comparing them to a known master copy.A continous timeline of tree rings exists for England back to pre Christian era, however there are small portions of tree rings which are even older, but which cannot be connected into the continous sequence.To my mind this gives a new significance to the term family tree.