With regard to the missing comma, I think that's just me being sloppy when I was editing my original post before submitting it. I had moved some text around a few times and must have lost the comma during the dicing and splicing without noticing.
Sorry too about the confusion regard to the short titles with
Reg and
Rec. I do actually use both, depending on whether the evidence has come from the GRO's register or a parish record, but it would have been a little clearer if the two examples I had picked were the same! I currently have 10 conditional expressions for marriages in total. Five of them check the first to fifth family records for a short title containing "M. Reg" and five check the same for "M. Rec". Depending on whether it is a civil ("Reg") or a parish record ("Rec"), the icon appended is a solid-coloured spot or a coloured ring.
You are correct about multiple green icons being displayed where appplicable. The parents of the man in my OP can serve as an example here:
- Screenshot2.png (14.14 KiB) Viewed 1442 times
This was grabbed fron an ancestor diagram so you are not seeing the other spouses, but the icons in this example are displaying correctly. William's parents, John and Mary, had both been widowed previously and their marriage to each other was a second marriage for both of them. I can see from the icons that I have a GRO certificate for John & Mary's marriage (the solid green spot, numbered 2) and that I have a parish marriage record for Mary's first marriage (the green ring, numbered 1). I have not yet been able to track down a record for John's first marriage so the relevant icon in that case is absent. The absence of a spot/ring numbered "1" for John alerts me to the fact that I still have a missing marriage record to search for.
The numbers in the spots/rings relate only to the individual to which they are attached, not to the couple. Couples don't always have the same tally of marriages each of course, it just happens that in this case John and Mary's marriage to each other was a second marriage for both of them and so the numbers in the spots for their marriage happen to match. If John had been a bachelor when he married the widowed Mary, then his spot would show "1" while Mary's would show "2". This is fine, and I can see no practical way to accomodate it even if it weren't.
However, and this brings me back to my original post, the icon displayed can be an issue when the number of marriages are miscounted. When William married his wife, Frances, it was a first marriage for both of them but Frances's icon for that marriage is showing a "2" for the reasons I outlined in the OP. In this case, the family is in my direct line and fairly recent so I know the facts and can just overlook it, but in the less-familar reaches of my tree it would wrongly suggest I am missing a record.
