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First thing you do, get a big stack of authors of the appropriate era and make reading them part of your day. It will give you a sense of how families worked.
Obviously, extended families were a thing (you'll probably want the Bigger Households hack). Unmarried daughters lived with their parents looking after them in their old age and were inherited by their nephews; residents of an entailed property might find themselves suddenly owing Head of House rights to a distant cousin they've never met, etc. Blended families were extremely common, as many male occupations were dangerous and death during childbirth was high; also, older men married younger women, often much younger, and produced second families (often bitterly resented by the first family) when the first one was nearly grown. Play around with the family trees. These things did not only happen in rich families - poor families were often huge because the guy whose wife had just died bearing his fourth child and needed a wet nurse would look next door at the widow whose husband had died and who was weaning her sixth child and needed a source of income and say: "Hey, let's solve each other's problem real fast" and she'd say; "Oh thank god," but with all those extra mouths the widower can't afford to move to a bigger place.
Servants. Even poor people had servants because there was simply Too Much Work to keep a household properly, especially if you had someone who physically couldn't work, or culturally wasn't allowed to do certain kinds of work. They often lived in and the Head of Household was considered to have authority over them similar to that he had over his children.
Unrelated adults also banded together for economic reasons. Middle aged spinsters with small incomes whose extended families didn't want them living in their houses for whatever reason went looking for other middle-aged spinsters in the same boat. Wealthy spinsters and widows who wanted to keep control of their money hired companions and invited interesting people to stay with them. A professional party guest in those days was not paid to attend one-night parties, but lived by providing charming, interesting company and being invited on months-long visits to people in large houses who basically provided room and board in exchange for being amused by conversation and always having someone around to play card games, dance with the wallflowers, play the piano, or whatever. Young unmarried men shared chambers with their friends to make ends meet. And so on. Poor families took boarders who ate at the same table and often got intimately involved.
Practically every household in David Copperfield is what we (and the assumed nuclear-family structure of The Sims) would consider non-standard. Mrs Gaskell, the Brontes, Austen, and dozens of less well-known authors can show you how it was.
Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
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Widespot,
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Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)