Marriage Date/Place Display in Records

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: In the Family Members field of a record the spouse of the individual appears with a marriage date/place in between. Though I often attache a complete marriage date and place, only a fraction date/year or place/state often appears. In going to enter the "COMPLETE" information so it appears in the record, I will find 2-3-4, as many as 10 entries, one of which is the complete DD/MMM/YYYY and Place I entered, as well as similar or fragments of the data. The only way to ensure the COMPLETE data appears visible seems to be to delete the other entries. The display does not appear to be last entered or last edited, but some random selection of the multiple data points in the record. Rather than having to delete multiple entries, or worse - edit them all to be the same, or have some else touch the field and have some other version be displayed ... 1) Always display last entered or last edited in that order or 2) Designate a preferred. I have found lots of valuable complete date hidden in this field by the seemingly random display processing.

LegacyUser

Paul said: In my experience, it is always the earliest date in the Relationship Events box that is displayed on the Person pages of the individuals concerned.

This subject has been discussed in various threads on this forum, but there is no indication that FamilySearch intends to deal with this and related issues.

The problem is compounded by the fact that marriage banns and licence sources are nearly always treated as though they relate to the actual marriage event, so (as they pre-date the marriage) they currently take precedence when it comes to the event openly displayed.

I have been very disappointed at having to delete this useful detail from the Relationship Events section but there is little alternative at present than to do exactly that.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: I always delete duplicate entries and have the last one looking the best with the most place details possible. I'm "OCD" like that. No need for duplicates. But I agree, it would be nice to designate a preferred. When a person has married several times and that person divorced one person, then I would prefer to see the divorce details instead of the marriage details. (I prefer to see both, but if I could choose, it would be the divorce details.)

LegacyUser

Paul said: Not being a LDS church member, I do not know if there are any instructions as to what event should be entered if the same couple divorced then remarried. Because of the default position, you would have to delete the first marriage (if it appears in the Relationship Events section) if you wished the later event to be displayed on the person pages. But maybe LDS folks are advised to give precedence to the earlier marriage, in any case.

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: Normally, for an individual, you see all marriages that person has had ... with dates and places and children as available. The date/places/children should be for the specific marriage couple. Those marriages are always displayed oldest to newest, followed by alphabetical if no marriage date is provided. It is very common for a spouse to die, and the living person remarry later in life. For those that divorce (early) and a subsequent spouse becomes the "parent" for the children ... the children can be listed under both ... one as biological and one as "step" (it being very difficult to locate formal adoption papers if we were trying to split that hair -- which I am not).

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: I am just attempting to solve a simple data display problem ... and it seems the conversation is going the direction of the laborious solution I use -- delete the partial and duplicate entries in the Marriage date/place field.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Yes, as I have said, there is no alternative to doing just that - despite Family Tree users making numerous requests to apply enhancements to the feature under discussion.

Most of us probably experience the same problem, but the position is not immediately obvious as - unlike everywhere else in the program - you still have to click on "Edit" in order to see the "hidden" details (of these multiple events).

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Paul, if you are talking about the ordinances that the LDS church members do, the marriage date/place is insignificant toward it and there are no instructions to it. I think the ordinance card would just show what is shown on the normal FS page. I wouldn't delete a legitimate marriage just so I could see the last marriage. Although, I could see someone doing just that so they could get their preference to show on the ordinance card. But then they should restore the information after as that is valid family history.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Thanks for clarifying the "LDS position", Jordi. Obviously, using the "public" version of Family Tree one does not relate issues to ordinances, although I have always to keen to avoid any action that might adversely affect this work.

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: To be clear we are speaking of the public,civil/church wedding date that appears in the "Details" primary view of the individual's record in the "Family Members" section between the individual and the spouse. LDS Temple Ordinance data is kept separately in the ordinance tab. I see nothing there that should be saved other than the single, most complete, marriage date/place for the indicated spouse. As we all experience there are entries for date/place that are any combination of day/month/year and city/county/state that you can create -- plus duplicates of all the combinations. The idea is to DISPLAY the most complete description of the marriage information, and the only way to do that currently appears to be to delete all the extraneous and duplicative entries.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: ... and nor would I personally want any other way of doing it. It would be seriously hard to get the system to decide which event of several "duplicates" should be the one to display. And such algorithms tend to have, with the best will in the world, holes in them.

So yes, I'm afraid deleting the duplicates and partial-duplicates is the way forward. I share your pain - been there, done that.

Let's just be thankful we can only have one birth event!

LegacyUser

Paul said: Unless you're like L S Lowry, who always claimed he was born the other side of midnight to what is officially recorded (I forget which way round)!

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: I live in America now and my birthday is technically the previous day due to time zone since I was born in Netherlands. So I kinda have 2 birthdates kinda like old date/newdate birthdate people.

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: Huh??? FamilySearch entries are not on Salt Lake City time zone, and data is not rectified to U.S. Mountain Time. You are born at the time and date you were born as recorded at the place where you were born, and that is your birth event.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Richard, officially yes. It would be too complicated to do it otherwise. But i was born at 5:30 in the morning in CET and live in MST zone now. I do all my timing according to MST/MDT now. So for me I was born 9:30 MST the previous day. This is just looking at it in a different way. Officially my birth event is still according to the 5:30 AM CET day. I would not write down the previous day on any official records obviously.

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: This sounds like you are just trying to rationalize opening your birthday presents a day early!! :-)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: There are a couple of unresolved issues with the way that FamilySearch handles couple relationships. One has to do with the display issues, but the other has to do with the couple relationship events.

It is not unusual that a couple will marry, divorce, and remarry at a later time.

It is not unusual that a marriage to a different person occurs between the divorce and subsequent remarriage.

FamilySearch adds marriage information (under the control of the user) from a "marriage" record to the stack of existing marriage record data. It doesn't matter if the dates have been correctly indexed or not (in the case of affidavit and licence records, they are often misidentified as marriage information, wherein they are only indicators that an official application to marry is being made).

So, as has been requested a number of times, FamilySearch needs to rethink how they are presenting this information on a person's details page.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: It may or may not be interesting to consider how the Richard Burton / Elizabeth Taylor marriage / divorce / remarriage would be handled in a GEDCOM compatible program. Obviously it depends on the program but generally there are 2 options:

1. Against the "family" (or "spousal relationship" if you prefer) for the first marriage, add a second marriage event so that relationship has two marriage events.

2. Leave the relationship for the first marriage untouched and add a second relationship using the same individuals so that each relationship has its own marriage.

Both options work in the software that I use.

When I check in FS FT for RB&ET, RB has two wives called ET, with different PIDs. The first (the read only marriage) has 2 marriage events, though that is only visible if you actually click on the pencil icon, so yes Tom, as you say, "FamilySearch needs to rethink how they are presenting this information on a person's details page."

So it looks like FSFT supports option #1 - even if its visibility is not good.

Option 2, I have no idea about FSFT support - the second wife called ET has a different PID so doesn't test option 2. (I think we have discussed them before but life's too short to try GetSat's search for a mere diversion!!!)

(She only has one marriage event to RB, which isn't read only. As an aside, this does cause me to question making stuff read only if you don't police the creation of dupes of the read only items!)

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: And it may be that compatibility with GEDCOM software is important for synching...

LegacyUser

Richard George Reynolds said: I applaud the discussion as it has splintered into more esoteric parts of the marriage relationships with potential for remarriage to the same person multiple times.

My initial interest was what I thought was the simple representation/display of the best available/most complete marriage event information for an individual and their spouse. If we could get that problem solved (certainly recognized by prior discussion!), that would be progress. The special handling of the more complex - marry-divorce-remarry-divorce-remarry sequences can, today, be handled in custom notes; with "See Notes" in the Marriage date/place field.