I suggest that with marriage records, instructions include, as additional items, the parents of the

LegacyUser

James Forest Olson said: --without which a lot of information is being lost

LegacyUser

Carol Jo Menges said: I just saw this through my email feed and remembered a lacking in records that surprised and frustrated me back around the turn of the century. I was given a set of CDs by someone who was then supervising at least a part of the program for east European records, prior to Indexing. I spent about ten years transcribing records from a few villages / cities in Austria-Hungary. These were mostly Galician families. Due to given-name conventions of the time there, most children were given saints' names, with very little to distinguish them one from another, even within the same family, certainly within the village. Middle names and /or nicknames helped, but not always, because parents' names also conformed to this naming convention. It was particularly difficult to decide whether, between the birth / baptism, marriage and death records whether I was looking at a person or a family I had transcribed previously.

I realized how confusing it would be to most researchers--even professionals--to sift one family out from another under those circumstances. I don't remember all my instructions, but the one I'm talking about here is that I was supposed to leave out of my transcription the house number of a person in the record, to not even make it a special item set apart from the other basics I'd transcribe. The house number (i.e., address) would often be there to be found, but FamilySearch wasn't interested then in having that be transcribed. The reason I was given by the head of the department was that FamilySearch wanted researchers to delve into the records themselves, not have all the pertinent information given to them without searching further on their own. As a long-time researcher I knew that most people would not be ordering microforms to study the family further--especially as there would be multiple microforms to pay for in the ordering, the languages were not likely to be known by the researcher, and most people who want to do research--as we in the Church are asked to do--can become quickly stymied in their attempt to do the good they tried to do. And then they'll give up their future attempts to try again.

I discussed this with my ever-patient head lady once and she agreed: that it certainly would make good sense to have the house number included in the record transcript. East and central European families tended to stay put whenever they could, at least during the times they raised their families, and the house number (i.e., address) immediately identified the same-name family members. She agreed with me, but we *both* were frustrated with the system's instructions at that time. For myself and my own RootsMagic database base and the records I uploaded to RootsWeb (now defunct), I certainly did add house numbers to each person in the record when the names corresponded to my ancestors' and relatives' names.

Today I wonder if that old rule about house numbers will carry on in the new Ukrainian records contract that The Church is making with Ukrainian archives. I definitely hope *not*. I'm thrilled with the news and am waiting to find my people from two and three generations on back in "the old country". Whatever helps me to quickly and surely find them will be astonishing and miraculous. I honestly don't believe the Lord wants it to be harder than it needs to be and already is.

LegacyUser

Gabriella Zavilla said: Hi James,

I agree! It'd be great to include spousal information when attaching a record and adding new people on the spouse's side. What I usually have to do is open the spouse that I added, then on the Records tab review the attachment of the record that says Unfinished Attachment. This is time consuming and you simply might forget to do it! Also, there might be many records with unfinished attachments.

100% behind your suggestion!

LegacyUser

Paul said: James

I assume you are referring to indexing instructions. If so, I agree that - where possible - there should be consistency when it comes to projects of a similar nature. So, in the case of marriages, the instruction should be to always include names of the spouses' parents, whenever these are shown in the original document (or transcript thereof).

However, it is just possible that in certain cases the owners / custodians of these records make it a condition of the FamilySearch indexing project that such information is excluded. This would mainly be for commercial reasons - i.e. to ensure that to get the full information from the original document one would need to go to them (say the record repository) and purchase a copy.

I agree it is very frustrating to find a FamilySearch record that has missing data - e.g. no age at burial, or even a specific parish name (only the county). To suppress my feelings of frustration (and blaming "FamilySearch") I have to make the assumption detailed above!

LegacyUser

David Wynn said: The problem crops up in the documents themselves, and in the way indexing is performed. Indexers are only provided access to a single image at a time, and must index what information they can glean from that. Marriage records are created different ways at different times and places. Some have all of the bride, groom, and parent information on a single page / single image. I've seen others that did more of a fold-out approach.

Although perhaps practical for the time, I've seen one set of documents that had the bride / groom / marriage date and location on one page, and the parental information on another. If referencing the images, its usually fairly easy to see which pair of pages fit together (as in, does this image fit with the image just before it or just after it?) because of handwriting styles and participant's names. But when this was indexed, half of the images were helpful (bride / groom / marriage details) and the other half were less than useless (two sets of parent names with no indication of age of parents, or date of event, or specifically which two children brought the families together).

So, its often not the fault of the indexer in failing to index the parents. It could be a fault from the limits of the document itself coupled with the restraints of the indexing system.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said:

However, it is just possible that in certain cases the owners / custodians of these records make it a condition of the FamilySearch indexing project that such information is excluded

Yea, remember that index are only intended for you to digitally search and find individuals in image based records. If everything was transliterated onto the index, people wouldn't have a need for the original source other than to verify how accurate the indexing was. But now once you've found someone in the index, you need to go to the original document (possibly only available on the owner's website) to get any extra details.