Family Historian User Group

IMO it's not worth creating a DEA that still leaves you with a shed load of manual data entry to do.

My feeling is that historically (though perhaps not these days) divorce was not so much an event as a long drawn out saga, and the "shed load of manual data entry" is inevitable.

I have a set of images of divorce papers from the late 1930s which I could supply if you need them. They start in December 1936 with the divorce petition (3 pages) and end about twenty images later in March 1940 with the Court Order for the respondent to pay the petitioner's costs to the petitioner's solicitors. It's a bit like deciding what to do with military service records: do you create a fact for every step of the journey, or just create one fact ("he was in the army" / "they got divorced"), and put everything in a lengthy note? I opted for the second approach.

Within England alone there have been so many changes in the divorce process over the years that I don't think it would be practical to create a DEA which would cover them all. (Until 1857 it needed an Act of Parliament for a couple to divorce!)

Until 1857 it needed an Act of Parliament for a couple to divorce!

And now it only takes one Act of Stupidity and a couple of weeks