Feature Request: Officiator at weddings and funerals or burials

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: It would be nice if we could enter the person who officiated at weddings and funerals or burials.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Tom

As with your post at https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea..., I don't see a problem here: you can do this now - with a Custom Fact or a comment against the relevant event. Otherwise, Discussions could be used to give more detailed information than the current Family Tree "fields" allow for.

Surely the "list" could go on and on? Best man, bridesmaids, pall bearers. I don't mean to sound sarcastic (honestly) but I'm afraid of what you might be unleashing here! The more we can add the more chance of the individuals' records / person pages becoming more and more cluttered.

Please elaborate and help me better understand the reasons for your requests.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: One of the ideas behind this site is Family History, not just genealogy. As such, all of those you mentioned could or should be included.

When it comes to history, I don't worry about having too much, but too little. When it comes to having a lot, it is going to be harder for a person to come in and mangle and existing record, but that wasn't my purpose.

I responded in the other feature request, and I don't have a problem with you bringing up these thoughts.

In most of these three events, the external folks are not recorded. But there is also a case for recording godparents and those may find their way into certain religious records.

These are truly what I consider enhancement requests, which will likely find their way down on the priority list, which is also fine. Since I am working with records of this nature right now, I didn't want them to slip my mind (easy to do at my age), so I posted them.

LegacyUser

Juli said: The officiator is very seldom genealogically or even familially relevant; in those rare cases where it is -- for example when my ancestor the Lutheran minister declined to officiate at his own child's funeral -- it can be entered as a custom fact. Otherwise, the name of the officiant can be there in the detailed notes/transcription of the source citation.

If you feel the need to branch out into family history, that's what the life sketch and entire Memories section are for.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I want to be able to record the officiator, because it is often important to the family. It doesn't matter if the person is a justice of the peace (for marriages) or related or not. I just want a place to record the name in conjunction with the event.

That's all I'm asking for.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Why the pushback?

If such a feature does get included, no one is demanding that anyone uses it. It is an optional feature that I am asking for.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: 1. Cheap and nasty solution - allow the creation of a text note against each and every event (vital or otherwise) & attribute - including the name(s).

I emphasise that allowing a text note against each & every event etc... is not cheap and nasty. It's seriously important and seriously missed by me. The cheap and nasty bit is that you'd put the names of witnesses or whatever into the text note - there'd be no active link to get to that person's profile (if it existed).

No, these notes do not belong in the Life Sketch - that's a Sketch, not the place where you'd record the exact details of why my grandfather's registered birth-date is 2d earlier than his actual, or possible reasons why my 4G GM was baptised late. Nor are they collaborative notes.

Now, I realise (sarcasm warning) that this is highly unusual and the event based notes have only appeared in - oh just about every genealogy program that I've ever seen, including PAF, which was written by some organisation based in Utah.... (sarcasm off)

Probably advisable to collapse such notes initially but reveal their presence with an icon against that event.

2. Less cheap and nasty - add the text notes as suggested above but this time add the ability to list people mentioned and enter their PIDs - not unlike the way memories work. What I'm not sure is how the reference would appear on "the other end". For instance, the text note for someone's wedding (oh yes, these notes need to appear on the couple's relationship box / fly-out / whatever as well) might mention that the best man was Name-XXX PID-1. What would appear on the profile for PID-1? I think that it might be best to display such notes on a new tab where the "origin" / "principal" event would be referenced but everything would be read-only. You'd need to go back to the "origin" / "principal" event to update anything.

This is getting very close to the concept of "witnesses" in software such as TMG and FamilyHistorian (and ?) where people with a secondary role at an event (such as marriage witnesses, executors of wills, reporters of vital events) can be linked to the event or whatever.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: "If you feel the need to branch out into family history, that's what the life sketch and entire Memories section are for."
But the link between the events and text in those sections is totally absent - they need to be visible together.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: While researching her early American ancestry in Lincoln County, Kentucky, my wife kept seeing the same person (he had a very unusual name) as witness, or some other function for the event. She eventually was able to pull together his role in the family and establish who he was.

I hadn't thought about that until I read your reply, Adrian. What would be nice is to be able to link all the events he has participated in, which likely is a function of sourcing and indexing.

Which leads to another aspect now that we are finally making a bit of progress toward index corrections -- and that is, clicking on a person in the source and being able to identify that person in the tree, much like parents of bride and groom are included in the marriage record of the children.

Anyway, getting back to what you said, there is another option and it really didn't occur to me until I was reading your comments, and that is include the relevant persons in the reason statement for the event. It is an absolutely lousy place to put it (almost as bad a a separate note, but not quite) and it won't show up until a merge is attempted.

Hopefully FS will get around to using the same layout and information as presented in the merge compare screen for the hint compare screen. That will go a long way toward accomplishing what I would like to see.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Yes, I really don't like mis-using the reason statement for that purpose (although I have) because of the risk of someone wiping it out with a new reason, under the impression that the new reason is just added to what went before. (Shortly followed by, "Ooops - where did that text go?")

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Bumping this for the beginning of a new week. Looking for a response from FS, not pushback on this request.

LegacyUser

Angelo Longo said: I've recently begun to work on adding baptism records from the Catalog to Family Tree, so I decided to add godfathers and godmothers to Family Members. I've decided to do so because I know the importance that they still have today for godchildren in southern Italy, even if the catholic 1983 Code of Canon Law abolished their conception as “spiritual parents”, an ancient tradition that was received by the 1917 Code of Canon Law. In the 19th century I've even found some instances of children taking last names of godfathers instead of those of natural fathers, even if the latter ones were present in the records!

I was thus very surprised to not find godparents between Parent Relationship Types, and I had to use the more similar type of “Step Parents”. So my ancestors now have a “Step – Father” and a “Step – Mother” in addition to their natural parents instead of a “Godfather” and a “Godmother”.

Even I would also strongly suggest to add them to the list of options.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I believe that that is what TAGs should be used for. You should be able to tag sources and/or NOTES to any given vital. Unfortunately we can't even use tags to relate sources or notes to couple relationships or parent child relationships. You have to duplicate all notes or sources for relationship entities and create redundant data all over the place. This creates entropy in the system and complicates what should be a much simpler structure and making it harder for everyone to understand.

Vitals are called vitals because they are VITAL to uniquely identifying a particular person. A marriage date and location is vital to identifying a person's marriage. The person that officiated the act is not a vital piece of data relative to identifying an individual or couple. Since it is not, I don't believe that it belongs in the same fields with the vitals for that person. Although viewed as important by some, it belongs in a different location.

Let's only put VITAL data in a persons vitals and other historically related information in another area (such as a generic NOTE on the marriage that can be TAGGED to the vitals of interest on the individual(s)).

Keep the system clean and uncluttered. Keep the genealogical information and memories information for the family history in different areas with the ability to cross reference between them.

LegacyUser

Angelo Longo said: I agree with you Jeff, the person that officiated the act is not a vital piece of data, and should not be included in Family Tree. Nonetheless, I think that godparents should instead be included, as I replied to you in https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...