Marriage Document Options

LegacyUser

Fred Turner said: An option for "Marriage License" needs to be added as an option in the drop-down for "marriage". A large number of sources show the License date as the Marriage date. Another entry should be for "Marriage Bond". Many times all 3 were used in 18th and 19th century.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Hi Fred,

One of the major problems is that the marriage-related records have been improperly classified. This has been discussed before, but I do not understand why an index of a book containing affidavits (which are required in age-related issues) to apply for a marriage license is classified as a marriage record?

The affidavits are at least one more step away from an actual marriage and that marriage is not recorded anywhere on an affidavit, only that the person has the proper permission or is of age to marry.

Likewise, a reading of marriage banns do not constitute a marriage, and yet they are classified as a record of the marriage when no such thing has taken place.

And of course, where marriage licenses are issued, the license does not constitute or certify that a marriage actually took place, only that a license to marry was issued by the presiding authority over such matters or their representative.

In many cases a marriage license will have the date of the marriage added by the officiator after the marriage has taken place and/or as part of the license itself.

For many years, a number of us have been asking for the correct terminology to be used with respect to marriage-related records and be able to specify the type of record that is being sourced, relating to the date(s) and place(s) in such a record.

The entire Family section of a user's profile needs some serious work and this is one of them.

Thank you for bringing this up as it needs to be repeated over and over until we get the ability to properly handle those marriage-related sources and events.

However, I'm not going to hold my breath for that to happen. It took ten years of requests before FamilySearch finally got around to giving us a means to correct indexes, and even then the full ability has yet to be provided.

LegacyUser

Cheryl Burk said: While everything you have shared is true, Tom, I for one am grateful for a FREE program that allows everyone to work together to build their pedigree. While there are some things we have to work around as we do our research, the ability to work in a Worldwide Tree that allows me to meet and work with my extended family members is great!! I know improvements will continue to be made.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Fred,

You are exactly correct. What you are talking about is a "Couple Relationship Event" Type. As Tom points out, there is a lot of cleanup needed in the Couple Relationships are. However I have noticed that FS has recently addressed some of the terminology problems that used to be there. The couple status that used to be called a marriage has now been relabeled to be a "Couple Relationship" (because not all couples get married). The events that used to be referred to as marriage events is now more correctly being called "Relationship Events".

A given couple can have multiple "Marriages", "Divorces", "Annulments", or even "Common Law" or "Lived Together" type events during their relationship with each other. Marriage licenses, Marriage Banns, and Marriage Bonds are also different types of Couple Relationship Events that can occur and should be added to the list of event types. In other cultures there are other couple relationship type ritual events that might also be added.

Since the cleanup of the terminology has been put into place (kudos to FamilySearch!), adding your suggested items should not be too hard, and hopefully if a FS employee sees this, they might get added in the next little while.

But as Tom pointed out, there is some significant things that need to be worked on. For example, only the first marriage in the couple relationship will show up on the Time Line for that person. subsequent marriages and any other event types (such as divorces) are missing from the Time Line for those persons.

Another thing is that the handling of sources for those events is very clumsy and different from the way they are handled elsewhere (i.e., via tagging). Reasons statements are hidden and not readily available for verification. Furthermore, if you have a relationship source already attached to a person's source list, there is no way to get it to be made visible in the couple relationship area. FS tried to automate this and it didn't work.

So we do hope that these other types of things in the Couples relationship area are improved over time. But your suggestion should not be a big deal to add.

BTW,

A large number of sources show the License date as the Marriage date

This is just from someone not performing their indexing correctly. Frequently the more prominent date that the event was recorded is indexed instead of the actual event date. Obviously if you block-copy that info over from the source to the individual's record while using the source linker, you'll have to go in and correct it afterwards but this is a common issue with the source linker and the way index files are created.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I think that I can speak for Tom and myself in saying that we are both VERY GRATEFUL to have this tool to use for building our family histories. This does not change the fact that many inexperienced and non-computer savvy members run into great frustrations in trying to understand and use this tool. This is mainly because of structural issues in the user interface which can (in many case very easily) be changed in a way to make huge differences for these folks. We have an obligation to report these types of things to FS so that they can be evaluated and possibly implemented by them.

Being grateful is important and many of us here truly ARE grateful for this tool (myself included). But when we are so grateful that all we do is just sit around saying "All is well in Zion; Yea, Zion prospereth, all is well", then we know what can come of that if we don't contribute to the work.

We know that the "improvements (that) will continue to be made" are frequently based on suggestions from people here in the feedback forum. It's probably not a good idea to misinterpret different people's critique of the system as a lack of gratitude, since it is usually our gratitude for the system and wanting it to function well for everyone that is driving us.