Add Marriage License Field
At present, Family Search has several fields related to relationships, including marriage and divorce. I would suggest adding a drop-down option for marriage licenses.
Quite often, a marriage license date is the only data available. Commonly, patrons submit the license data as the actual marriage data without any notes, leading to confusion. Additional confusion results when license dates are added in addition to marriage dates. They do so because there is no other option except "Marriage" in the drop-down menu.
In theory, patrons can use the "about [date]" feature; in reality, that does not happen. There's a (very) slight chance, of course, that the couple did not get married. It's been my experience, however, that patrons are just seeking to establish a date after already verifying the relationship. Marriage dates are always helpful, but particularly critical when attempting to determine biological relationships among blended families when one of the mothers has passed away.
Comments
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This topic has been raised on several occasions in the past. However, this does not make your suggestion any less valid, of course.
I believe FamilySearch is, at last, now indexing marriage licence and banns records as a separate category of record - i.e., not simply as "Marriages" - although I believe some are being indexed (or at least added to the database) as "Marriage Notice(s)". Better than "Marriage", I guess, although the implication now is that the detail relates to a marriage notice placed in a newspaper!
As has been noted previously, the "Couple Relationship" section (that forms part of an individual's profile in Family Tree) has probably been the least developed feature since the introduction of Family Tree in 2012. Perhaps FamilySearch developers are giving its (eventual) update careful thought and will include the options to add data (under separate headings) that relate to associated "events", such as the issue of a licence or banns records.
Whatever the plans, there will continue to be confusion over the precise details of the actual marriage event until such a time that the details of / differences between these related events is recognised when being categorised / added to the database (and, subsequently, to Family Tree).
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And add marriage bond date as a separate field. Too many couples have the bond date as the actual marriage date when the marriage happened days later.
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