Age at marriage
I have noticed that the system is confusing marriage records that provides a confirmation that bride (or groom) is at least 18 years of age, with a marriage license that requires an actual date of birth.
For example, on Cordelia Fickle (KZ72-LHK), who was born 30 September 1837 in Marion County, Ohio, and married on 2 October 1859 in the same county. In 1859, Marion County Ohio was using a form that merely confirmed that the parties had reached the age that allowed them to marry without parental permission.
The system is saying that her birthdate conflicts with the date on the certificate which the system is imputing as 1841 (1859-18= 1841) based on the age allowed to wed. You get the following message:
"Cordelia Fickle, "Ohio, County Marriages, 1789-2016" has a date of 1841 for birth, which is different from 30 September 1837."
The problem isn't her date of birth, but the system shouldn't confuse the verification language of meeting a legal age to wed as a conflicting birth year.
I do not know if this is happening in other states, but I have come up against with forms used in by some Ohio counties from 1867 - 1900ish.
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/KZ72-LHK
Comments
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I've seen a similar message when the profile has a Cook County, Illinois delayed birth registration. The algorithm calculates the mother or father's year of birth using the year of the delayed registration rather than the year of birth of the child.
An example: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/GC2W-3YZ
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@monnettohio thank you for bringing this to our attention. This is a records/indexing issue and is being forwarded to the proper group. Regarding just the marriage license…it appears to be limited to a certain set of records using that particular certificate style. Thank you for your patience while we dig deeper to correct this issue.
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Rhonda, true, but many small counties didn't use preprinted marriage record book entrees, instead, they used ledger entries. Many states didn't require full birth dates until the end of the 19th century, but instead went with the "at least" formula. It would be interesting to find out at what point states require full-date recording.
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As Rhonda says, this is really more of an indexing issue. With English marriage licence records, the term "aged upwards of 21" (or similar) is frequently used in the original documents, but unfortunately nearly always the age is indexed (by FamilySearch volunteers, ect.) as "21" - when the individual could well be 31, 45, 66, or any age above 21, of course.
The result is that (as you acknowledge) 21 years is deducted from the (marriage) event date - and the individual often ends up with a totally wrong birth year against their profile (i.e., if it was blank previously).
The main way to avoid these errors and conflicts would appear to be not to index ages as (literally) 18 or 21, say, when that is far from suggested in the original document(s).
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