The good Doctor Theopolis is confounded by Address Book butting in where it’s not wanted. He writes:
When I print labels with Address Book it adds names of spouses and children from their respective fields, making the first line of the mailing label so long and therefore small (due to automatic sizing) that the labels are useless. Is it really supposed to work this way?
Apparently so. The idea is that if you’ve taken the trouble to add a contact’s family members, it’s likely that you’ll want to address the entire clan on an envelope or mailing label. And that’s fine for personal correspondence or holiday cards, but less than ideal for business correspondence. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways you can work around this.
The more tedious way is to create a separate card for each family member that you don’t want to appear on the label and either assign no address to that contact or assign an address different from the one for the related contact. For example, if you don’t want Shiloh, the kid of Sheila Jones of 123 Main Street, to appear on the list, create a separate Shiloh Jones of 321 Main Street contact. As I said, tedious.
Less tedious is to open the contact in Address Book, click the Edit button at the bottom of the window, click on the relation entry (child, father, or spouse, for example) and choose Custom from the menu that appears. In the resulting Add Custom Label sheet, enter a new relation entry, but with the first letter capitalized—Child rather than child or Father rather than father, for example. Address Book adds relations to envelopes and labels only if they’re the original lower-case names that Apple built into Address Book. Create a new name with the first letter capitalized and the application no longer recognizes the name as a relation and therefore won’t spackle it to your envelopes and labels.