* Change Marriage to Blessing

[neil40]

Hi all

Some time ago now, I added a 'marriage' of our neice, in France, and found subsequently it was a blessing, and the legal registry office marriage was 3 days later in London.
Is there a way to change the original marriage into a blessing? I tried the 'Change any Fact' plugin, but can't figure if that will do it.
Thanks
Neil

[Mark1834]

It doesn't, but the Change Specific Fact plugin is designed for exactly that scenario.

[neil40]

It doesn't, but the Change Specific Fact plugin is designed for exactly that scenario.

Thanks Mark
I've installed it and selected the 'marriage', but in the New Event fields, the Blessing fact isn't there?

[Mark1834]

Neil,

I get the same. Investigating further, "Blessing" is defined in FH as an Individual Fact, not a Family Fact, and you cannot interchange between the two types.

The solution is to create a new Custom Family Fact. Give it a distinct name, such as "Marriage Blessing", to avoid confusion with the existing fact.

It is surprising (to me anyway) that there is not something defined already, as it is a common scenario. How do other users deal with it?

[tatewise]

As Mark said, there is no standard Marriage Blessing Family Event, so you will have to define a custom event.

Alternatively, you can add a Descriptor to the Marriage Event to describe it as a Blessing.
See Recording a Civil Partnership that explains how to adapt a standard Marriage Event to be a Civil Partnership event.
The same technique can be used to adapt to a Marriage Blessing.

[neil40]

Thanks both, I have created a custom event as suggested.

[Mark1834]

That's an interesting read. In properly defined and written software, it shouldn't matter one iota whether a family have a conventional marriage, civil partnership, blessing, or whatever other arrangement they come up with.

A much more likely scenario in our historical records is where there is no marriage event at all, either because a couple never married, or it hasn't been located yet. I've never noticed that as a problem before, but what specific examples are there please of something significant that fails because there is no conventional marriage for a family?

[tatewise]

Mark, I am not aware of any fundamental problems with a couple in a Family record having no Marriage Event recorded.
However, there are some consequences in Diagrams and Reports because FH assumes all such couples are married spouses even when there is no Marriage Event.
So in reports, they are often referred to as Spouse, Husband, Wife and in Diagrams are connected by the = marriage lines.

It is only by setting the FH Marriage Status that those Report and Diagram assumptions can be altered.
However, that is a non-standard GEDCOM FH customisation which does not migrate to other products.