* Marriage names

[neil40]

Hi,

A distant 'cousin' in my tree, married two Sarahs. I just discovered comparing two entries for him in subsequent Censuses. In 1881 his wife Sarah was near his age, yet in 1891 his wife is significantly younger.

So, I've tracked the second wife down, found the marriage and note she too was a widow.

However, my dilemma is that he married her as Sarah Hodgkins, but her maiden name was Cooper, and if I put her father in she changes to Sarah Cooper, which is correct for her first marriage, but not for her marriage to my distant cousin, and is showing up in reports as Thomas Grantham married Sarah Cooper (not Hodgkins, which is on the marriage register)

How do I correct this please
Thank you
Neil

[AnneEast]

A woman should always have her own maiden name. She was still the same person who was born Sarah Cooper! I usually make a note that she was a widow with the surname Hodkins at marriage with my relative.
Anne

[Valkrider]

Record her as Sarah Cooper, add her first marriage and the death of her first spouse and then reorder the events for her. This is what I do.

[neil40]

A woman should always have her own maiden name. She was still the same person who was born Sarah Cooper! I usually make a note that she was a widow with the surname Hodkins at marriage with my relative.
Anne

Whilst I agree Anne, if they are widowed (as opposed to divorcing and reverting to maiden name), they marry under the new name and that is how it should record in the narrative, as per the register.

Neil

[tatewise]

Neil, could you please use User Control Panel > Profile at the top of this web page, and update Family Historian to your Version so it appears in the panel on the right of your posting, and we know which version you are using.

The problem is that in the FH database a person cannot have two Primary Names.

There is no basic option to make the Name change depending on the Date of a Fact.

One option is to manually edit the Sentence at the bottom of the appropriate Facts to use the Name you prefer.

Alternatively, in FH V6 you could probably design a custom Sentence Template for say the Marriage Event that uses Functions to extract database details to choose the appropriate Name automatically.
e.g. It might be possible to associate the nth instance of Spouse Family (FAMS) (holding the MARRiage Event) with the nth Name (NAME).

[Valkrider]

Whilst I agree Anne, if they are widowed (as opposed to divorcing and reverting to maiden name), they marry under the new name and that is how it should record in the narrative, as per the register.

Neil

Neil

I have several of these and the marriage certificates / parish register all show something like:

Ann Smith previously Jones formerly Adams

If you want to quote the entry 100% correctly then surely you should include this format?

[neil40]

Whilst I agree Anne, if they are widowed (as opposed to divorcing and reverting to maiden name), they marry under the new name and that is how it should record in the narrative, as per the register.

Neil

Neil

I have several of these and the marriage certificates / parish register all show something like:

Ann Smith previously Jones formerly Adams

If you want to quote the entry 100% correctly then surely you should include this format?

No, it doesn't say anything like that. Just her married name Sarah Hodgkins daughter of William Cooper (decd)

Neil

[AdrianBruce]

... they marry under the new name and that is how it should record in the narrative, as per the register.

I'm no fan of the poor way that GEDCOM handles multiple names but having just one name visible in the narrative at the point of the second marriage, is wrong from some point of view, whichever name is put in at that point.

By convention (and only by that) genealogists tend to refer to women by their birth names throughout. Therefore suddenly substituting another name will confuse those people.

On the other hand, not using the previous married name at that point will, as you say, result in a difference when compared to the source document.

Personally, I don't have a problem with differences when compared to the source (e.g. ages on censuses) but this issue does irritate me.

What I do to try and resolve matters is add the first married name as an Alternate name. (Why only the first? Logically I should add both but that would be too much like hard work and in any case it doesn't seem to cause too many issues.)

On my diagrams, I then have a line in the text scheme to show the second and subsequent names, viz:

Code: Select all

a.k.a. %INDI.NAME[2+]:FULL%

Naturally(?) this applies to all alternates, not just married names.

Then to cover the narrative reports where it says "He married Margaret Brown on dd mmm yyyy" (where Brown is the birth name), I have to try to remember to put a line into the Note for the marriage to say something like "She married under her then married name of Margaret Murphy" (say).

Bit clunky but, given the limitations of GEDCOM and the different expectations that people have over the use of married women's names, I'm not sure we can do better.

[AnneEast]

Humph!! I see all you blokes don't think a woman needs to keep her identity. Although I took my husband's name by convention I maintain I am still the same person I was when I was born. That is my unique identity. It really irritates me when I see trees (eg on Ancestry) where the women are not entered in their real names. There is a reason why there is a genealogical convention of keeping a woman's real name! (Rant over LOL)
Anne

[neil40]

Anne,
I am not trying to lose the identity of the women in my tree, I am trying to present them in narratives the way my research finds them.
In this case the parish register told me that Thomas Grantham widower married Sarah Hodgkins dau of William Cooper.
I will also record that Sarah Cooper married Joseph Hodgkins

I used to use The Master Genealogist to record data, where this wasn't s problem, before switching to FH and it seems that using Gedcom for its data has its shortcomings such as this.
Neil

[AnneEast]

You can see why in many cultures of the world women keep their own name throughout their lives! We must agree to disagree on this one!
Anne

[tatewise]

The Sentence created by the Fact Sentence Template is only a default, which should work in most cases, but can be overidden on any specific Fact.

So you can always make the Narrative Sentence say whatever you want by editing the Sentence field of the Fact in question within the Facts tab.

[AdrianBruce]

Thanks Mike - I should have realised that.

For those of you even less certain than I was, I've just adjusted a Sentence for a specific marriage Fact to:

Code: Select all

{individual} married {spouse/her/him} (she was recorded as {=GetFieldText(FactOwner(%FACT%, 1, FEMALES_ONLY),"%~.NAME[2]%")}) {date}< ({date:DAY_OF_WEEK})>< at {address}>< {place}> {their ages}.

Note that this sentence omits the witness roles found on the default marriage fact sentence. This requires my method of recording previous married names as alternative names for married women. It's also specific to this particular circumstance, which is that the woman has married twice, this is the fact for her second marriage and her previous married name is in the first alternate name (i.e. in NAME[2] ).

The result looks like this:

• He married Margaret BROWN (she was recorded as Margaret MURPHY) on 26 December 1791 (Monday) at St. Helen's in Witton, Cheshire, England.

Beware - this single sentence applies to both parties (as it's a family fact) so the sentence in her report looks like

• She married Samuel GREEN (she was recorded as Margaret MURPHY) on 26 December 1791 (Monday) at St. Helen's in Witton, Cheshire, England.

Note that this leaves both names in the narrative, partly because that's my preference, but also because I'm not sure how to suppress the first name for the wife without suppressing the first name for the husband.