Family Historian User Group

Another thread turned into a discussion regarding recording of Marriage details in Ancestral Sources. I quote from the key bits below for convenient future reference and for further comments:

Nick Walker said:
I would imagine it will (in some cases optionally) create:

Marriage (family) event (address/place/date of marriage)
residence for groom
residence for bride
occupation groom
occupation bride
birth groom
birth bride
Father of groom's occupation
Mother of groom's occupation
Father of bride's occupation
Mother of bride's occupation
Witnesses - not sure of best ways to deal with them yet

I've not really totally thought this through yet, when I get closer to the stage where I'm ready to work on this I'll ask for opinions.

aragorn said:
Hi Nick
You have said that you are not sure yet as to the best way to deal with witnesses (to marriages).
Can I suggest that when entering a witness you can choose if the individual is already in FH (ie a relative etc)and create an event for them or the option to create a new individual as an associated person (to both bride and groom)and create the event for them.
I am really looking forward to having Ancestral Sources able to deal with events other than the census.You are obviously very busy and do this in your 'spare' time but it is greatly appreciated by all of us!
Good luck and best wishes.

Gerry Newnham said:
I would support that approach too.

Nick Walker said:
I've had a number of different methods of dealing with witnesses suggested.

e.g:

Add the 2 witnesses if they don't exist and add a custom event to them both

Add the 2 witnesses if they don't exist and add associated people links

Just record the 2 witnesses in the local note of the marriage event, etc.

I suppose the answer is going to be to give various options to keep everyone happy, but of course that ends up taking more time.

ID:4658

My preference is:

Add the 2 witnesses if they don't exist and add associated people links

Please don't limit the number of witnesses, I have instances of 3 and 4 to a marriage in Parish Records.

Stevebye said:
Please don't limit the number of witnesses, I have instances of 3 and 4 to a marriage in Parish Records.

I think you might have to draw the line somewhere. I believe that at royal (and perhaps other) weddings most of the family sign as witnesses. Recording all of them might be considered 'overkill'!

Gerry

In some cases (mostly pre 1837) the same person witnesses almost every marriage on the page, not because he is in any way connected with the couple, but probably because he was the Parish Clerk and could write his name.

I don't want to create every witness as an individual in FH, just the ones who are family members, the others I am quite happy to record in a note.

Irene

ireneb said:
...
I don't want to create every witness as an individual in FH, just the ones who are family members, the others I am quite happy to record in a note.

Irene

Irene,

I am probably arguing against myself (nothing unusual there, I here you say!) but it is the witnesses you don't recognise that sometimes turn out to be related and therefore the most useful. They may lead you to other members of the family that you didn't know about or to marriages that you couldn't find or to completely revising the parentage for one member of the family (that has just happened to me!). I'm sure there are many other possibilities.

Gerry

Yes, but if you have them in a note you can always create an individual record later.

ireneb said:
Yes, but if you have them in a note you can always create an individual record later.

True! But I would prefer that a person record is created as it  is more likely to be picked up, especially by programs such as AS.

Gerry

ireneb said:
In some cases (mostly pre 1837) the same person witnesses almost every marriage on the page, not because he is in any way connected with the couple, but probably because he was the Parish Clerk and could write his name.

Irene

In most cases the Parish Clerk, Wildsmith Badger, and after he died, his son, Henry, don't appear as witnesses.
In one marriage with four witnesses three are family members. In some cases where there are three all are family members. Like Gerry I found this out long after I found the marriage details.

I have recently found cases where the county clerk on a delayed birth record application, and the attending doctor on the death certificate turned out to be related to the applicant and deceased, respectively.

Of course I didn't find this out until much later.

'I think you might have to draw the line somewhere.'

and

'I don't want to create every witness as an individual in FH, just the ones who are family members, the others I am quite happy to record in a note.'

The program itself shouldn't have a limit. It's the users who can decide what they want to record or not. The program should not have a limit like a set number of fields to fill. It should just allow witnesses to be added until the user stops.

As to how the witness info is set up, I would say that using the associated person field is the way to go. Since this is new stuff and not something many people do already (since it's awkward to do in Gedcom and not many programs support this field fully) I would say that this is something where you can cut back on options. The more options you provide the harder it is to program and the harder it is to maintain.

While agreeing with the sentiment Jon of not adding too many options to keep it simple, in my own family history file I don't particularly like the idea of adding witnesses as individuals. I have absolutely no idea who most witnesses are and have several who are 'professional witnesses' as discussed earlier in this thread. While I agree that there is a chance I will one day find a link the chances are not great so I'd probably prefer to just put the witnesses in the local note of the marriage and perhaps choose to link to someone if I do know who they are. Frequently I get witnesses like 'Edward Walker' where there are 2 or 3 Edward Walkers (brother, cousins) who could potentially be the witness. My current thought is that I would probably allow the user to decide as they select each witness whether they want them associated with an individual record or simply recorded as a local note.

I always feel we should record our data as we believe it should be recorded and not to fit in with limitations in the current version of whatever software we use. However, I do need to consider how Family Historian Reports will display these witnesses if they are associated people. Many users will get confused and annoyed if Ancestral Sources records their witnesses but they don't show up in reports as they would like. Actually I'm just guessing about this as I've never used the associated person - do FH reports handle them?

As I said, and as you can probably tell, I still haven't thought this through in any great detail so please do keep the discussion going.

Nick

I did try to use the Associated Person facility but to my mind it is too vague. What I wanted was to be able to specify in what way two or more people are associated and I don't think I could do it. So what is really needed (and I don't know if the gedcom standard allows for it) is a proper witness field in the Marriage Record that can be linked to an individual if that person's identity is determined (as in many cases it can).

I accept that if a witness's identity can be established then recording them as a witness might be  evidence that they were alive at that moment! And if a marriage register/certificate is peppered with witness names it might be an interesting exercise to identify them but I doubt the genealogical usefulness of recording all of them.

Similar considerations might apply to those misguided parents who give their unfortunate offspring a name for every letter of the alphabet! Can the gedcom standard deal with such extravagance? - should it?

Gerry

Gerry Newnham said:And if a marriage register/certificate is peppered with witness names it might be an interesting exercise to identify them but I doubt the genealogical usefulness of recording all of them.

The usefulness of cluster genealogy becomes more apparent in large urban areas or in any situation where you have multiple people with the same name or similar names. One of the bloggers I read has a relative named John Kelly in New York City. Needless to say, there are many different John Kellys living in NYC in the same time period -- if you find a record, you have to have some way of sorting them all out.

Business associates and other people mentioned in documents can help determine which John Kelly the record actually belongs to.

This discussion so far has centred on Witnesses but I should like to raise another point re Marriages.
Often one of the parents is recorded as being deceased.
If a death / burial record did not exist for that individual, I always record a date of death as being before 'Date of Marriage'.
It would be good if AS did this automatically.

If a death / burial record did not exist for that individual, I always record a date of death as being before 'Date of Marriage'.
It would be good if AS did this automatically

Rather than automatic, an option would be preferable for me.

On a general issue, would it be better to keep the extension of AS to include register and certificate based data fairly simple to begin with and to add the 'bells and whistles' at a later stage? Would this help Nick to get the extension to AS up and running sooner? Would it be difficult to go back and add data to existing entries at a later date? Would that matter?

For many early parish register entries, for example, the amount of data that can be entered is very limited - eg for baptism, the name of the candidate, the date of baptism and the parents' names. No address, no occupation, no date of birth etc. So I could envisage an initial version of AS only recording this very basic level of data. I have plenty of those and would be happy to wait for a fuller versions of AS that could deal with the additional information in later registers and BMD certificates.

There is a danger that if the initial requirements are too wide-ranging then the development of the extension of AS may get bogged down in discussions on minutiae. Better to get a simpler version sooner, perhaps?

In no way is this meant to be a criticism of either Nick or the contributors to this valuable forum - merely a cry for help from someone who has dozens, if not hundreds, of BMD and parish register entries awaiting input!

Happy programming, Nick!

Gerry

I do have loads of Baptism Records that have address, Occupation and date of birth details. Plus a few Private Baptisms. I'd rather not have to go back to enter this information.

I've said before that my plan is to tackle baptisms next, followed by marriages. I certainly won't be trying to meet the needs of every single possible entry that users might come across. Ultimately the extra events, etc. can always be done afterwards in Family Historian if A.S. doesn't create them.

Nick,

That's fine by me.

Gerry

I know there are people much more experienced in using FH than I am, but this is what I do with marriages.

I don't know what the Associated Person facility is. I have created an Event/Attribute called 'Marriage Witness' and a sentence that reads 'He/she was a Marriage Witness on [date] in [place] at the wedding of [then I complete this bit myself]'. Probably not at all the correct way of doing it, but I wanted to record the fact that a relative attended a marriage and didn't know how else to do it. I don't bother to add people I don't know are related, just make a note of them. I would create a person and add the event at a later date if I found they were related.

It has also occurred to me that perhaps AS will probably link to the fathers of the couple. I only ever link the marriage event to the fathers if they are family, both direct and indirect; but I wouldn't want to create a father of a siblings spouse as I would end up with thousands of people I wouldn't be interested in.

Debbie said:
I have created an Event/Attribute called 'Marriage Witness' and a sentence that reads 'He/she was a Marriage Witness on in at the wedding of [then I complete this bit myself]'. Probably not at all the correct way of doing it, but I wanted to record the fact that a relative attended a marriage and didn't know how else to do it. I don't bother to add people I don't know are related, just make a note of them. I would create a person and add the event at a later date if I found they were related..

I do something very similar - slightly different wording that's all.

I am not sure that there is a 'correct way' of doing it - it's what suits you and your methods of working.

Regards,

maggie