Marriage updates
When a marriage document is attached with a less accurate date, i.e., year only, or no location it will supersede a more accurate item in the display. There should be a way to select the most accurate date/place for display.
Comments
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You are correct that only the most recent marriage event added shows on the display page. Personally I am hoping the the new formatting of marriage events on the new Person Detail page means that one day soon all marriage events will display.
However, back to your comment. Rather than have a way to select the most accurate date/place for display, you really should just delete all the less accurate or incomplete date/place. There is no reason to have four marriage dates/places that are all the same but formatted differently and more or less complete listed on a couple. And if you are attaching a marriage document with less accurate information, then just do not move that information to the right in the source linker.
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Agree with 2nd paragraph.
I always check the marriage section and flushed out duplicates and less complete ones, keeping only the complete one that is supported by source
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@fredheld1 is correct. Just to clarify what appears on the Details page - i.e. what appears as the "display date":
The earliest (chronologically) of the dates added always appears, regardless of when we have added any other dates. This is why a marriage licence or banns event often causes the marriage ceremony event to be replaced on the Details page. Further, a given year will always take precedence over a full date. For example, if I add dates of "1940" and "1 January 1940" as event dates (perhaps inadvertently during source linking) "1940" will be the display date.
Whether there should be a way to retain alternative information in the Couple Relationship / Events section has been raised here on a number of occasions. Why should we have to delete a perfectly valid date - e.g. where there has been a civil and religious ceremony and only one (the earlier dated event) can appear on the Details page?
The matter of recording licence / banns details in the Couple Relationship area has been raised in a separate thread. The problem in the past (and perhaps still is) has been FamilySearch's failure to index these events correctly. They have been recorded as "Marriage" events (instead of "Marriage Notices", as is now more common), so even experienced users might have difficulty in recognising their true category and allow them to be displayed on the Details page - superseding the actual marriage date, in many cases.
I have been arguing for an enhanced Couple Relationship area for quite some time now, but perhaps I should be careful what I wish for! I am still using the old version of the Details pages because, as with those awful "new" Records pages, I just can't adapt to the new page layouts.
Regardless of my personal issues, I remain baffled as to why the Couple Relationship area has always seemed so divorced (excuse the pun) from the rest of the Family Tree program.
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Interesting! I had not noticed that the marriage event information sorts chronologically, just like the Events section does for events that have dates. Has it always done that? Or is that a relatively recent update?
I think there are some subtle hints that FamilySearch is working towards displaying all couple events. The most recent possible indication is an update in the Family Members section where the event acts more like every other data block on the page. When you hover over it, the entire block turns grey:
And when you click in the grey area, you get the preliminary View Data pop-up where you can see all the sources tagged to the data. Unfortunately it is still true that you can only tag sources that are on the couple page, not ones on the source page for either individual.
The next step would be to put all the couple events one after another in that couple box instead of just the first one. It seems like that should be fairly straightforward. It would make the Family Members section longer and move the children farther down but it would get all the information visible.
It's a tiny bit confusing that when you click on the pencil icon on the detail page you go to the full relationship view but when you click on the pencil icon in the View Data pop up you go directly to editing that specific couple event.
I agree that it seems strange that marriage information is so hard to handle. But then even in the days of paper forms it seemed that people designing the forms had trouble coming up with what to do with it. In the desktop programs I have used, PAF for Mac then Reunion, marriage information has also had its own separate area. I've wondered if there is just something inherently difficult with combining a database in which there is a one to one correspondence of data (person - birth - death) and a database with a more complex structure (person+person - marriage).
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Gordon
I followed up on this you mentioned about the marriage dates.
Indeed the first posting date is listed first, even the 2nd post is more complete. I imagine it's same with more than 2 dates regardless of how complete the entry may be.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please
If by "posting date" you are referring to the order of inputted dates, I'm afraid you are incorrect.
The date displayed on the Details page(s) is always the earliest chronologically. I again tested this a few minutes ago and inputted 1950, 1930, 1940, 1960 as separate marriage event dates for the same couple and 1930 becomes the display date.
With regards to the "more complete" version of a date, I was surprised to find the result. If I input "1 January 1930" this does replace "1930" as the display date, but "2 January 1930" does not (even with the 1 January 1930 date deleted)!
This is the order of dates that take precedence in finding their way to the Details page(s), regardless of when I added them to the Relationship Events section:
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The reason "1 Jan 1930" replaces "1930" at the head of the list, but "2 Jan 1930" does not, is that the computer interprets bare years as the beginning of the year: "1930" is equivalent to "1 Jan 1930", chronologically. The tiebreaker is completeness, hence "1 Jan 1930" coming first.
Similarly, "December 1930" is treated as "1 December 1930" for sorting purposes, but an actual entry of "1 December 1930" would come first, because it's more complete.
I have in the past explored what happens if multiple marriage events with identical dates are entered, but I don't remember the result. I think at that point the tiebreaker was entry order, first in, first out, but I'm not absolutely certain of that.
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Julia
Not in my case, it is irrevealant, what it displayed as I see them is earliest submission get listed first regardless of the dates.
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