Unmarried Parents
1) What is the correct way to input unmarried parents in FamilySearch?
2) Can children be sealed to unmarried parents?
Answers
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Dear HCMJ:
I was unable to quickly find the Knowledge Article for your first question, but if the people are put in without a marriage date, it is recognized that the two people were not married. A note can be added on the right that says the were not married.
Here is the Knowledge Article that addresses your second question. Yes, children can be sealed to parents that were not married. They are considered common-law marriage. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/do-common-law-spouses-have-the-same-precedence-as-married-spouses. Please let us know if there are any other questions.
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This also came up on the thread https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/147726/how-are-unmarried-parents-best-represented-in-familytree
The problem with not putting in a marriage date, is that it only means that there is no marriage date. That could be because nobody's got round to putting a marriage date in yet. Notes can be ignored and are therefore less than satisfactory - but it's probably the best anyone can do at the moment.
@PABulfinch - I'm not sure quite what you mean by "They are considered common-law marriage". The Church (I'm not a member) is perfectly entitled to seal whoever it decides, of course. It's the view outside that I'm concerned with.
I get twitchy over the topic of Common Law marriage because it's very misunderstood. Here in the UK, there is a major tendency for people to think that unmarried parents are common-law spouses - not so. The UK has never had Common Law marriage (and I got that statement from a professor of marriage law). Even in those jurisdictions that do have Common Law marriage, there are, so far as I can see, all sorts of conditions that have to be in place before a couple can be considered Common Law spouses.
So not all unmarried parents qualify to be considered as legal Common Law spouses.
It could be, of course, that your link explains all that, in which case I apologise for repeating the information but, not being a Church member, I can't see the link. As I said, it's the secular and legal angle that I'm concerned with because that plays a major role in determining how our relatives lived.
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