under Marriage Event types, could you add "Never Married"

JErickson71

Under Marriage Event types, could you add "Never Married" in addition to "Lived Together". They are not the same thing.

Thanks, Jerry Erickson 😄

Adrian Bruce1

The problem with "Never Married" is - how do you know. What most of us (myself included) mean by "Never married" is "I can't find a record of their marriage". Which isn't the same thing, either. (Family) History is full of couples who went off miles away to get married specifically so as not to upset anyone where they lived. And unless we're really lucky, we may not find that distant marriage. I've even found a case where a couple swore blind to the world that they were not married - when they were. But if I hadn't found that marriage some distance away, I might have believed the deliberately misleading statement in the will that the couple were "just good friends".

I'm happy to explicitly say "I can't find a record of their marriage" but so long as I think logically, I know that this doesn't mean "Never married".

Cheryl Viering

In birth/baptism records, a note that the parents are not married is sometimes included. This is informative, and it would be nice to record it in a way that it obvious to see, without needing to click down into the marriage event details.

Perhaps "Not Married" would be a better option for the marriage type.

MarDee Adams

I have an aunt who recently died age 98 and was never married. I know this as a fact as I knew her personally very well. I put in the "fact" section that she was never married and my reason that I know that. You can also put it in the "notes" so that it becomes noticeable

Adrian Bruce1

In birth/baptism records, a note that the parents are not married is sometimes included. This is informative, and it would be nice to record it in a way that it obvious to see, without needing to click down into the marriage event details.

Definitely agree that it would be nice to include this but please remember that there is only one of these that is easily visible per "marriage". If the couple are unmarried at the time of their first child (say) but married by the time of their 2nd or 3rd child - how do you record that?

You can't have two marriage types for the same couple of "not married" and then "married". The type (in this case) is surely "married" with an event of "marriage" that comes after the birth / baptism of their first child (in this case).

Basically, yes I'd like to make all this stuff clearly visible, but at the moment we're trying to get a quart into a pint pot and make one item (the Event Type) serve two purposes (Type of Marriage and Events Happening To That Marriage). Since FS FT only shows the first such item at the moment, it messes things up if there's more than one Event. Or is it more than one Type??? 😕 So yes, I totally agree with what people want to show but the way the system is set up right now, it doesn't work with the simple changes being suggested.

Yvonne Withers Russell

As I have been learning through DNA discoveries, sometimes couples produced children that were never married to each other because they were married to other people at the time.

So I like the idea of creating some sort of note about couples that there is no marriage for that couple because they weren't married, but they did have sexual relations that resulted in a child and that needs to be addressed.

HESM

This accommodation has already been made. You just need to delete the relationship in the edit relationship box. Once you've deleted the relationship, no SS will be available. The child will still be linked to both father and mother, but there will be no relationship between the parents. Here is an example of what it looks like. Emeline Cole was assaulted by John Watson White, which ended in the birth of her child John. The couple was never married, and never lived together, and White denied having any relationship with Cole. There should not be a couple relationship between them, but the fact remains that they are the parents of a child.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@HESM, in cases like that, you can go a step further: if the parents were not a couple, you can enter them separately.

(No, I haven't entered profiles named "Child", "Mother", and "Father" in the actual tree. The illustration is from the beta/sandbox site.)

Gail Swihart Watson

I have adopted relatives whose birth parents were never married to each other, but they were certainly married to other people. The two birth parents also never lived together. Thus, I would use "living together" and "never married" only in the few instances where you know it is accurate.

Adrian Bruce1

My problem with the ideas from @HESM and @Julia Szent-Györgyi is that they show up the inadequacy of the events, attributes and relationships available to us in FS FamilyTree on the topic of parental / spousal relationships. I keep banging on about the need to positively record the situation in order to make it absolutely clear that we haven't simply forgotten something.

In the case of White & Cole, there is no relationship in FS FT. But that's not a positive statement that there never was a real-life relationship, it's just the absence of something. An absence that might be due to "I forgot..." or "Did I press the delete button there?" To make it worse, the User Interface actually commands us to "Add Couple Relationship". So someone comes along, does what the UI says, and bang goes the carefully constructed set-up. (There may be Notes - but people don't always read Notes).

I also have serious problems with the two separate parents idea. That could equally be due to one person knowing who the father was, another knowing who the mother was, and no-one knowing the full story. Until along comes someone else and, unaware of this idea, puts the two into one "relationship". After all, there was a biological relationship  between the two - or at least, we believe that there was. If we believe that there wasn't, then one of those parents shouldn't be there...

I firmly believe that there needs to be at least two attributes that can be assigned to a couple of parents in similar cases, viz:

• one-off or very short term physical relationship only;
• physical relationship, did not live together, no formal relationship.

 These would provide positive indications of what's going on, and wouldn't rely on users understanding what the absence of something means.