Why is this record appearing as a "duplicate" source?

LegacyUser

Paul said: I know these are not "true duplicates", by virtue of the different URLs and different / additional detail between the two versions. However, the collection is the same for both ("England, Yorkshire Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1613-1887") as is the date (23 March 2020). In which case, why are both sources being offered?

Has the record been indexed twice? And what about the citations both having the same date? Any ideas as to why the source shown in the first screenshot has not been retired (or even added here) would be appreciated. To me, this appears to be a case of both sources being added to FamilySearch on the same date, one of which does nothing to supplement the other.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Unfortunately, I don't have access to any of the images, so I'm hypothesising - a posh word for guessing.

But in FindMyPast, a "marriage licence" usually has two images and two index records. One is for the Marriage Bond, the other for the Marriage Allegation. (And neither is for the actual licence, which seldom survives!)

The Allegation is probably best described as the actual application and the Bond is the bit where some muggins promises to pay the Bishop a huge sum of money if it turns out that the bride and groom were not "legally" (in canon or secular law?) entitled to marry. In addition, there may even be a 3rd entry - an Act Book entry, which is a one-liner recording the issue of the documents.

So between those options, you might have the answer why you have multiple index records.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Now why didn't I think of that? I've even seen cases like this on FamilySearch - probably whilst at an affiliate library - where (images show) the two sources are linked, respectively, to the two pages of the document.

Thanks for that prompt and almost certainly correct response, Adrian.

When it comes to "duplicate sources" there seems to be an answer to every example, showing they are not really duplicates, after all!

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Yes, that's the unfortunate thing if you never go past the indexes - you never see the images of the real documents to realise that, yes, they are different documents. Or occasionally, they're not...

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said:

I know these are not "true duplicates", by virtue of the different URLs...

Normally, with exceptions from a problem FS created several years back, this is true. However, I've started seeing a bunch of exceptions to this recently. It may not be the same thing that you are seeing, but this massaging of the system with regard to persistent URLs seems to be creating duplicates of citations with different URLs recently. See:

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...