Mother's name on marriage license

TaylorWally

I'm indexing marriage licenses and there are fields for the names of the parents of the groom and bride. One record lists the mother of the groom as giving her consent for him to marry under age, but the entry is: Mrs. Charles Smith. (There is no entry for the father's name).

I know not to make assumptions, and I think that leaves nothing to enter: the title Mrs. is not to be entered. I don't know with certainty whether Charles is the father's name or the mother's name. Does that leave Smith as safe to enter for mother's surname?

Melissa S Himes

Thank you for sharing your batch. It is unfortunate that the Project Instructions are lacking in this project! The General Indexing Guidelines are missing and there is a broken link to the Basic Indexing Guidelines that haven't been used for at least a year!

Anyway...

When we have the formal name Mrs. Charles Smith, you index her given names as Charles and the Surname as Smith. Since this project does not have a prefix field, we ignore the title of Mrs.

Here is a Help Center Article and the link to the full article:

• If “Mrs” was used before a name typically used for males, such as in Mrs. Jason Jones, type Mrs in the Prefix field, if provided. In this example, type Jason in the Given Names field and Jones in the Surname field.
• If a Prefix field is not available, ignore the “Mrs,” and type the name in the corresponding name fields for the woman. For the example above, you would still type Jason in the Given Names field and Jones in the Surname field.

https://prod.familysearch.psdops.com/cmsa/idx/how-to-index-individuals-whose-names-were-not-fully-recorded

LarryClark43

Please share your batch code and someone will take a look at your batch and try to give you a good answer.

The batch code is the group of letters and numbers at the end of the project title. Just copy that and paste it here with your question.

TaylorWally

M9LH-6Q3

And thank you for the suggestion.

TaylorWally

Thank you for taking the time to provide the reference to the instructions. I'll follow them in spite of instinct.

Melissa S Himes

It's is kind of an old-fashioned idea that married ladies use our husband's names in formal settings. I still use my husband's given name when signing things with the title of Mrs.