Project instructions for Marriges in Michigan are incorrect.

LegacyUser

Gene Jeppson said: I have been reviewing Marriages in Michigan. My current batch is "Affidavit for License to Marry". Fields 1, 2, and 3 are for where Married City, County and State. Fields 4, 5, and 6 are for when married Month, day and year. The project instructions indicate putting the dates and places on the affidavit in those fields. This is an error because the marriage itself has not occurred yet. The given information is for the application to get a license to be married in the future. We do not know where or when the actual marriage will take place.

LegacyUser

Paul said: As I feared, the problem of not distinguishing between the actual marriage data and details attached to associated events appears to be continuing.

Would a FamilySearch employee PLEASE pass this matter to the person in your organisation who is responsible for the oversight of indexing projects?

There are already far too many sources that contain incorrect information. I mainly find this problem when marriage licence records are indexed as though their detail related to the actual marriage event. This is very bad genealogical practice and should be discontinued immediately.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: To reinforce this to people who apparently don't think it through (because there is no appearance of any thinking).

It's not just the minor detail that the date (or place) is wrong. Nor the minor detail that there might be two such events and who knows which event actually gets used.

It's the basic fact that the marriage might never take place! There might be, in FS FamilyTree, a record of a relationship between two people when, in real life, that relationship was never formalised - perhaps because they fell out or discovered that the other party was already married or ...

There are various ways to either get out of this or render the situation more explicit, ways which I feel have been discussed ad nauseum.

If this doesn't worry anyone from an accuracy viewpoint, shouldn't it worry someone from a Church viewpoint? (I'm not a Church member).