Entering in different information (Dates, places) provided by different sources.

LegacyUser

WXMX-999 said: Add specific fields for secondary or alternate dates of birth, marriage, death, etc. There are people with records that give different dates. One marriage record says they got married on this day, but another record says they got married 2 days later. If there were fields dedicated to capturing these alternate dates, and then making them searchable, it would make it easier to find someone who got married on either of those dates. And it would lessen the likelihood of duplicate record creation because people create entirely new records based on different dates. The same could apply for places. The original place of birth would be entered in the main field, but allow additional places to be recorded in secondary fields that are also searchable.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

When working with dates and places, if you find that one record has one date and/or place and another record has a different date and/or place, then you may be dealing with two different people, and not the same person.

There is one exception that I know about and it deals with Rhode Island records. The collection that was published by James N. Arnold can often contain two records for the same family that occur in different towns and most dates will be several days apart. This is because the birth took place in one place and a Christening took place a few days later at another place.

That is the only set of records that I know about that is like that.

In most cases the same event will have just one valid date and place. Anything else is either for a different person or may be a different record, but still identified as the same event.

So where do you cover such events? Well, if the second record is recorded as a birth (for instance, the James N. Arnold collection) but was a Christening, then you'll probably need to chase down the original records and record the event accordingly.

Otherwise, make use of the collaboration feature and use a Note (which can be deleted by anyone) or a discussion (which only can be deleted by the original author of the discussion) to discuss the situation.

One thing is never think about creating an alternate (name of event), because the event took place only once. There is either something wrong with the records, or there is more than one person who is being considered.

LegacyUser

Paul said: The situation where you find a marriage record with dates a few days apart is typically where the couple were married by licence. The problem with FamilySearch sources is they rarely have any indication that a record relates to the licence issue (or calling of banns) - everything is titled as a Marriage.

In most cases, the later date will relate to the date of the ceremony, so this is the one to record. Any other dates should be investigated and can be added in Family Tree as a Custom Event and/or your findings can be shown in a Notes item.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: frequently dates of marriage have been incorrectly indexed using the date that the certificate was recorded. Also ages/birthdates of young women (and to a lesser extent young men) are frequently wrong because the couple getting married lied about it to get around the current state laws on marriage eligibility (this is very common in records i have worked with in southern Ohio for years.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: This is the reason that just attaching sources themselves to the person record and tagging them to appropriate conclusions/vitals is often not enough. The logic that is used to determine why which sources are right and which are wrong, or why a calculated or estimated value was used needs to be formally documented in (say) a note for the person (e.g., titled BIRTH, or MARRIAGE, or whatever conclusion the note applies to).

And some day, if we ever get the ability to tag notes to conclusions like vitals, this will be even more valuable.

We don't really want all kinds of other guesses, indexing mistakes, dates from incorrect merges, etc. cluttering up the vitals page. Put all that information into a logic derivation note and explain why they are considered good or not, and then put the single conclusion that you've derived into the vital and include a reference to the note justifying that conclusion in the "Reason this data is correct" field for the data change