Belgian records: marriage event types
In Belgium there are only two event types when it comes to marriages: marriage banns and marriage.
In many cases, the records have the wrong event type: marriage as marriage registration, marriage banns as marriage etc.
How to solve this isssue?
Answers
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@Loïc Baert Great question. Hopefully members of the community will get involved in this. I think if someone would start by defining the differences between marrige and Banns it would help.
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The issue has been discussed many times in this community.
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Here's one example of a thoughtful comment about proposed options for event types on couple relationships. It would certainly be helpful if we could have more event types to describe the variety of events that happen around a marriage that are not actually a marriage.
On a couple relationship, there are limited options for events (Marriage, Divorce, Annulment, Common Law Marriage, Lived Together), with no custom event. Because of this, a record that deals with events related to marriage will have only two choices for events actually attached to the couple relationship:
- Categorize these events as one of those 5 options, even if it doesn't fit. This results in poor fits and outright mistakes, e.g., where a marriage license date is categorized as a Marriage date, even thought the actual marriage happened on a different date. It's never good to put the wrong date on an event.
- Omit the date entirely. That's probably the accurate choice, but leads to omitting data that is certainly useful (without it, you may have no information in Family Tree of even what decade the marriage happened in).
Of course, you can put any of this data in custom events on the individual profiles, but that requires it to be put on both partners in the couple relationship individually, which is more work and does not connect the distinct events on the two profiles together.
If we could just get custom events added to couple relationships, that change alone would let us add specific non-marriage events that are accurate. It would also eliminate the pressure to have record collections miscategorize events such as marriage banns or marriage license as Marriage. Of course, adding a handful of other standard relationship events might be helpful as well.
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The problem is also that we can't change the event type when getting a hint, see attached screenshot.
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@Loïc Baert Yes, you're raising an important distinction between the event type in the record collection, and events in Family Tree. The event type for a particular historical record is generally specified as part of the data for the record collection, and this can't be changed on a per-record basis. This is true for all event types: burial, death registration, census, etc., and is not particularly connected to marriage records per se.
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A record collection can hold multiple event types, how is this handled in general? It happened to me before that I was able to change the event type.
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Please find below a case where I can change the event. What is the difference?
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Hey Loïc!
Great question. I asked a manager at FamilySearch about this. He said they are working on adding the ability to fix indexing errors on all historical records, but they haven't gotten to all of them yet. Eventually, all should be editable.Hope that helps!
Kathryn
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