Family Historian User Group

Here's another 'what does everyone else do' sort of question.

Find My Past recently added some Devon Parish records, so for the first time, I have records of marriage banns from England instead of just the USA.

I've been working backwards in time, so I've been entering the details of the marriages themselves with Ancestral Sources. I've worked through all of those records, so now I want to record the banns.

The standard event in FH to record the banns looks straightforward, except that it only has one date field, and the note in the register notes all three weeks. What is customary when recording these? Do you date the event by the first week the banns are read, the middle week, or the last? What are the advantages or disadvantages of each choice?

All three dates can be entered in a note, but for the purposes of queries I might do later, how often do you need look for a specific date? Or is more likely that I'll only need to know whether I have an event for the Banns, that is, that I have the record or not?

Presumably one could create one event for the banns and cut-and-paste it two more times to have one event for each week the banns are read, but that seems a bit like overkill even for me. Besides, doing so obscures the fact that all three weeks are recorded on the same historical record.

P.S. I see from Ancestral Sources that there are marriage types "After Banns" (which covers most of the marriages I have entered so far), By Banns, By Certificate, and By License. I understand what it means to be married By License, and I think I understand what cases should be entered as 'By Certificate' (are those the ones where the couple married in the Register Office?). After I've finished entering the Banns for all the marriages which are marked as "After Banns", I'll probably have some Banns left over, for which I have no other record.

How do you determine which marriages should be marked as "By Banns" in AS?

1. For the date, I use a "Date Range" instead of a single date.

2. For the events for which you only have Banns and not Marriage entries, I'd record the banns event but NOT assume the marriage went ahead. (Although there will often be a parish in which the banns were read but no marriage took place, as it happened in another parish (where banns would also have been read).

3. I'm not clear on the distinction between 'After Banns' and 'By Banns'. Marriage Law for Genealogists by Rebecca Probert doesn't make any such distinction...

If you Google search for Marriage after/by Banns, and Marriage by Licence and Marriage by Certificate there are plenty of details.

AS only offers those terms as examples of what might be on the Marriage Certificate, but you can enter whatever is appropriate.

Marriage by Certificate does involve the Register Office but is not necessarily a Civil Marriage held at a Register Office.

I suspect the Marriage after Banns and Marriage by Banns terms are just AS alternatives for the same thing that might be found on a Certificate.

Some marriage parish entries and certificates use the phrase 'by banns' and others 'after banns' but I believe they are the same thing.

Thanks, everyone. That's very helpful.

Most of my marriage certificates were pre-printed with "by __________ or after __________". All mine were completed as "after Banns" but I believe the other possibility was "by Licence" (if Banns had not been read but a Special or Bishop's Licence had been obtained).

The printed forms that appear in English/Wales parish registers from 1754 just have

By __________

and either Banns or Licence are inserted. Later 19th marriage forms tend to have By_____ or After _______.