Improvement Request: Attaching Marriage Sources Through Source Linker

Gordon Collett

Currently in the Source Linker when attaching a marriage source, the source is placed on the couple relationship pop up only if marriage information is moved from the source to the couple like this:

Moving that marriage information from left to right results in the source attaching like this:

However, as can also be seen here, this results in a duplicate marriage event that now needs to be deleted.

If the marriage information is not moved over, then no source is created on the Couple relationship page.

This means that if there are multiple marriage sources, as there often are, then then only way to easily add those sources to the Couple Relationship page and to have them available for tagging to the marriage event, is to purposely created a bunch of duplicate marriage events then go back and delete all the duplicate entries.

Would it be possible to always have the marriage source attach to the couple relationship even if the marriage information on the source is not used to create a new marriage event for the couple?

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Your theory on when Source Linker adds the source to the relationship is a good starting point, but it doesn't explain everything.

For example, I attached a marriage source yesterday, and based on the place being "Magyarország", I must've taken up Source Linker on its offer of the marriage event (which I very rarely do). That explains the presence of the source on the segregated list -- but not why it was there twice, both of them the wife's version. They had the same URL, so I detached one of them -- which I can't prove, because the relationship change log doesn't work. (I posted a bug report in the New Person Page group.) I can, however, prove that the source is the wife's version.

I checked both the husband's and wife's individual sources, and their marriage is only there once in each case.

There's no reason for me to object to using the wife's version rather than the husband's, but I'd like to know why: how does Source Linker determine which version to use?

Gordon Collett

If the wife is the focus person and the husband is on the second line with the marriage information under him the husband's version of the source is used:

The above arrangement leads to:

If the husband is the focus person, then the wife's version of the source is used:

This arrangement leads to:

I haven't done all that much testing and only recently started paying attention at all so would welcome any counter evidence showing flaws in my current theory.

YColeman

Wow! Where the heck have I been for years. I have not been aware of any of this "behind the scene" stuff so to speak. I was aware there would be duplicates sometimes and the differences in the source descriptions but never stopped to analyze what was going on. I have always just dealt with it. Gordon, you are once again right on!

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Now that the relationship change log is working again (mostly), I've figured out why the source was duplicated: it wasn't Source Linker's doing, but the merge tool's.

Unlike profile sources, the merge tool offers zero visibility of or control over relationship sources: like the Collaborate tab, everything is silently and invisibly transferred, with no input from the user.

I don't know how the structure could be most sensibly revised to deal with duplicate relationship events in a merge, but to my mind, removing the problem for sources should be easy: do away with the segregated list. Offer all of the husband's sources and all of the wife's sources for tagging a relationship event. This would kill multiple birds with one stone, because it would make the request in this thread into a moot point.

Alan E. Brown

One important detail that gives even more support to @Gordon Collett 's suggestion:

If the event associated with the marriage record happens to match exactly (date and place) a marriage event already attached to this couple, then the source linker does not even give you the option of moving that event to the right (and thus add it to the couple relationship). But as Gordon noted, that addition of the event is currently needed for the desirable effect of attaching the source to the couple relationship, and thus in this case there is no way to attach the source to the relationship via the source linker. Gordon's suggestion would fix this problem.