Introduction
You may have a Marriage CertificateMarriage Certificates are a civil record of the marriage of spouses, and typically include the date and place of marriage together with information about parents, witnesses and ministers or registrars involved in the service. or a Marriage Register EntryMarriage details are recorded in the registers of a church, chapel or other religious venue whenever a couple is married. They usually include the date and place of marriage, and information about parents, witnesses and celebrants involved in the service. from a Church, Chapel, Synagogue or other religious venue, and want to understand how you record information from that Source. This article describes how you do that.
A companion article discusses some of the issues associated with Recording a Civil Partnership.
Capturing Certificate Details
Certificate details for the couple should be captured in a Family Marriage Event with a Source Citation.
Usually a Method 1 or ‘source splitters’ Source record will be created with a meaningful Title, a transcript in the Text From Source, and an image linked via the Media tab. Alternatively, a Method 2 or ‘source lumpers’ Source Citation will have one Source record for all Marriage Records, and each Citation will provide specific details including Media.
Automatic Source Citations could be enabled, and associated Individuals such as parents and witnesses, created or updated with Residence and Occupation facts.
A note on ages: Sometimes the Age is given as Full that is not allowed in a GEDCOM Age field, so enter > 21 yrs, which is what it means (or > whatever the relevant age of consent is at the time of the marriage). Sometimes Minor or Underage is given, and < 21 yrs can be entered.
Recording Ceremony Witnesses
In this context, WitnessesA Witness is somebody who played an important role in an event (or rarely, attribute) but were not a Principal, e.g. they could have been a bridesmaid at a wedding, rather than one of the individuals getting married. are not just the Marriage Witnesses named on the Certificate, but may also be the minister, bridesmaids, best man, etc.
From the perspective of the Witness Individual, those roles are not currently included in the
Witnesses employ a non-standard GEDCOMGEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. It is a file format that most genealogical programs and online trees recognise. structure not recognised by most other products, although this is partly mitigated by the Export Gedcom File pluginPlugins are small programs that allow new features to be added without upgrading Family Historian itself; some plugins are written by Calico Pie and others are written by users. that creates synthetic factsFacts are one of the key concepts at the heart of Family Historian; they are how you record the things that happened to, or described, each ancestor (Individual). for the Witness roles.
To list any roles in a marriage, right-click the Marriage Event and choose Witnesses, then use the Go To button and Locate Event for Witness to show their Property Box.
Using Ancestral Sources
Once you understand the data recording process including how to create and cite Source RecordsSource: “where information was found”. This could be anything from an archive in a county records office, a book, or even a relative’s recorded recollection. Citing your Sources helps to show how you reached a particular conclusion about an Individual., all the above steps can be performed using Ancestral SourcesAncestral Sources is a utility written by Nick Walker, designed to be used in conjunction with Family Historian to allow faster, more convenient creation of Census, Birth, Baptism, Marriage, Death and Burial/Cremation records. in a convenient and reliable way.
Ancestral Sources has options for recording the ƒh V6 Fact Witnesses but see Witness Facts for further advice.
Other Family Events
Other standard GEDCOM Family eventsEvents are things that happened to an Individual and Attributes are things that described them. related to marriage are Engagement, Divorce Filed, Divorce, Annulment, and Marriage Banns/Contract/Licence/Settlement.
Annulment effectively means the couple were Never Married and applying that Status makes the marriage lines dotted in Diagrams.
Related Plugins
- The Lookup Missing BMDAn abbreviation for Birth Marriage and Death events. Records plugin composes online searches for BMD records.
