Creating a source for a marriage
Greetings, I am wondering why when a source is created for a marriage, the souce is not added to the list of sources for the person. To me, it seems logical for all the sources to be listed together.
Answers
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I have not figured out the reasoning behind or the intended workflow of the couple relationships section. I complained about it this summer in the New Person Page group: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/165203/oy-the-convolutions-involved-in-getting-a-marriage-entered-and-sourced#latest.
That's the other direction from what you're talking about, but it's caused by the same thing: the inexplicable sequestration of the relationship from the rest of the profile. Adding a source to the relationship doesn't add it to either of the individual profiles, and when adding a source to the individual profiles, there is zero control or visibility into what Source Linker does or doesn't put in the relationship's sources.
Until/unless they fix the relationship section to better connect to the rest of the page, my only suggestion is to make good use of your Source Box: when you create a source for a relationship, always make sure to put a check in the "Add to My Source Box" checkbox. Ditto when using Source Linker to attach a source that's relevant to a relationship. This is the one (and really only) time where that checkbox is actually useful in that tool. (Granted, Murphy's Law states that if I remember the checkbox, then Source Linker silently/invisibly adds the source to the relationship. It's inevitably when I forget that it doesn't.)
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I agree with Julia that there needs to be far greater clarity on this, couple relationship details lurk largely unseen on the profile page (child/parents ones too).
In general, the Family Tree user interface (unlike, for example, the user interface for Records such as census entries) doesn't in my view give relationships the importance they deserve as the 'glue' that holds FT together.
I personally think that in an ideal world marriage and divorce sources would be attached to the couple relationship (where they can be tagged), not to the spouse profiles; and similarly birth sources would be attached to the child and to the child/parents relationship, rather than cluttering up the parent profiles.
I do know, however, that my approach simply doesn't work given the current FT user interface (and indeed the current Research Helps algorithms - not to mention partner solutions, which in my experience take no notice at all of child/parent relationship sources).
An an ideal world, perhaps, the Sources tab would show both profile sources and also sources attached to the profile's relationships, distinguishing clearly between the two types of source but allowing easy management of both. (I feel an Idea suggestion coming on.)
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I agree with the comments about the lack of quality / functionality of the Couple Relationship area - surely the item in Family Tree most overlooked by the developers.
Personally, I choose only to attach marriage / couple relationship sources to the individuals' profiles. Every finer detail of the Couple Relationship section is so hidden from view I do not consider it worth adding much there. I even add any note on a marriage event to the separate profiles, as most users would probably be unaware of them being added in the Couple Relationship section.
To illustrate to general quality of the section, one only has to check out "Facts" - where the one item in the drop-down menu is "No Children"!
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