Family Historian User Group

I have the following situation in my tree: A couple were together for many years and had children together. The male partner, the father of the children, is my relative. The couple ultimately went their separate ways and some years later my relative met someone else and this new couple actually married. There are no children from this second relationship.

In FH, I have both families sorted in the right order. There was no marriage event for the first family, the one with the children, and the relationship status is set to "unmarried couple". The second family has a dated marriage event and the marriage status is not set (or has been left on the default setting, if you prefer).

The narrative report did not handle this properly; it shoved the first (unmarried) couple to the end of the paragraph. I assume this is because there is no actual dated event associated with the first family, even though the families are sorted into the correct order. The generated output read:

[My relative] was born on [date]. He married [his 2nd partner] on [date]. He and [his 1st partner] were an unmarried couple.

It then went on to give my relative's 1st partner's details, followed by their children, and then my relative's 2nd partner/wife's details. (All OK there).

As a workaround to get the text in the desired order, I have added an undated marriage event to the first family (but left the status set to unmarried couple), and changed the sentence for this particular "marriage" to be the same as the sentence for an unmarried couple. The report then follows the correct order for the two families and outputs:

[My relative] was born on [date]. He and [his 1st partner] were an unmarried couple. He married [his 2nd partner] on [date].

It works, but it's cludgy and it also introduces inaccurate data, a non-existent marriage event, to the file, which I really don't want. Does anyone know of a better workaround or, better still, is there a way to actually fix the problem properly?

In such situations (and there are a few) I've used the marriage fact but changed the sentence to say they had a relationship and included known dates (aka if there are children then either side of the first and last children). I tend to prefer it to using the default wording of unmarried couple. I also use this method when it's likely the couple were married but no known marriage entry can be found (particularly for earlier centuries where records are more likely missing). That way if using a narrative report which includes children who aren't direct ancestors, their partner's details are included in the report. If no marriage event of any sort is included, then direct ancestor's siblings in the parent's childrens section appear to have died unmarried.

Peter, that is rather odd!

Usually, the order of the partners in the Spouse tabs determines the display order even without any Marriage events.
That is true for the Focus Window, Individual Summary Report, and Diagrams.

I would report the problem to CP via http://www.calico-pie.com/osticket/open.php and see what they say.
I don't recall anyone raising the issue before.

The sentence "He and [partner] were an unmarried couple." is produced by the Diagram > Options > Main tab setting for Auto-Generate Sentences if Missing Facts. If that option is not ticked then the sentence is not produced which is one workaround but not ideal because the partner is not mentioned at all except for the section identifying their children.

Here are a couple of alternative workarounds...

1. Use the Residence (family) fact for the unmarried couple giving Dates and Places as appropriate.
   Its Sentence can be customised to say whatever you prefer.
2. Use the Marriage Event as already suggested but set the Descriptor (TYPE) to say it was an 'informal' marriage.
   The GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification supports such use:

   For example, a MARR tag could be subordinated with a TYPE tag with an EVENT_DESCRIPTOR value of 'Common Law'.
   1 MARR
   2 TYPE Common Law
   This classifies the entry as a common law marriage but the event is still a marriage event.

   See FHUG Knowledge Base Recording a Civil Partnership under Fact Type Descriptor for a Civil Partnership which also gives a quote from the GEDCOM 5.5 specification.

Thanks, Mike. I may go with that 2nd option. I know using a marriage event achieves the desired result, and adding the descriptor will keep the data "clean" for any future users and hopefully eliminate any potential confusion.

Did you get a response from your problem report to CP?

I haven't got around to that as yet.