Enhance Couple Relationship Events Available
Add Marriage License to the standard list of Couple Relationship options:
- Recording Marriage License information and Marriage information is more accurate than only providing for Marriage: information.
- Avoids apparent confusion/conflicts in marriage information, especially when the information for the two events are provided on separate sources.
Also add Marriage Contract and Formal Engagement to the standard list of Couple Relationship options:
- In many cultures these are significant life events.
- These events can add significant information to a life story.
Comments
-
I am also troubled by the lack of flexibility associated with the Couple Relationship box. When you click the Event Type box, you are limited to several of all the types of events that could be listed here. Those events do vary depending on the culture and location of the event. I would suggest that you either add additional event types (banns, license, no couple relationship, etc.) or add the ability to choose "other" and then be able to enter the event type.
Visibility is another issue. Currently, the earliest event is what displays in the "Family Members" box and elsewhere. That makes the most sense for most relationships. Some have suggested that the most recent event should be what shows. If the programming can be changed, that is what I would choose.
Another thought would be to change the symbol you click on to reflect the possible uses. The pencil in the check box implies that you click on it to edit the relationship, when in fact, you use that link to both edit AND to view what is already there. Maybe it should be changed from the icon to a button labeled "Show All", similar to the button under "Latest Changes".
0 -
Over the years, the Couple Relationship section has been the most neglected part of Family Tree. Several enhancements have been suggested, but I can't recall any being adopted.
Inexperienced users would probably be very surprised at what is revealed by clicking on the "Edit" (pencil icon) that appears alongside the relationship event on the person pages. It possibly even reveals the hidden details of the true marriage event - instead of an earlier event date, which usually refers to banns or licence details.
However, we should be careful what we wish for - users have not stopped complaining since the search interface was "enhanced"! The same with "Find". Unfortunately, many of the engineers do not seem to appreciate the needs of everyday FamilySearch / Family Tree users and tend to concentrate their efforts on the more superficial aspects, largely involving graphics and general presentation.
1 -
It would be nice to at least be able to mark the couple as unmarried, if that is a known fact. In a way that is easily seen and understood by others.
1 -
Cheryl
It's 'Brett'.
Just in passing ...
Unfortunately ...
There have been COUNTLESS, requests/suggested enhancements, for such, for, MANY; Many; many, YEARS ...
As, yet, ... to NO avail ...
Just saying ...
I suppose, we can sill but live in hope ...
Brett
0 -
I agree. When my paternal uncle did DNA testing we discovered that he and my dad were half-brothers and that's why my dad hadn't matched anyone from his dad's side of the family on any of the DNA testing sites, but his brother did.
My grandparents were married when my grandpa went off to WWII, and so we've been able to determine by the few things my grandma shared before her death at 101 that she did have a "boyfriend" (her words) who had an apartment. Since I was able to determine who my dad's biological paternal grandparents were based on triangulating DNA matches and by process of elimination of their 3 sons (1 didn't even live in the community where my grandma lived at the time and the other brother who also lived in the area was married), I was able to determine who my dad's biological father is after his potential niece did a DNA test and it came back that they were within the range of a half uncle-niece relationship, we are pretty sure who my dad's biological father is.
However, the only option on family search is to add a "spouse" to connect my dad's mom and biological father together, along with a marriage date and location.
Since this is so common in family histories, there really needs to be an option to link parents together without it being a "spouse" relationship, since even among descendants of enslaved people there are biological fathers who were enslavers and never married to the mother of the child (so it also wasn't a consensual choice to have relationships that led to children for those women).
0
