* Engaged couples

[tarklequest]

Would any of you enter the fact that one of your family was engaged but then called off the engagement on your family tree. As the people in question didn't marry or stay together then I think one would not enter that on one's tree. However it might be an item of the family member's history so I wondered if it should be entered on the tree and how one would enter such information.

[tatewise]

If you wanted to enter the couple, then the process is essentially the same as entering a married couple.
Assuming both of the couple have Individual records, use the usual Add Spouse/Partner link to create a Family record.
Then instead of adding a Marriage Event, add a standard Engagement Event with whatever date, place, or other details you know about and perhaps a Source Citation.
You can also set the Status of the partnership to Never Married.
There is also an Extended Set fact for Separation if you thought that appropriate.

[AdrianBruce]

There are no rules about what you put in - but there are consequences!

Because it happened, and I tend to record many, many, many things, I'd enter it. It's a Family Event of Engagement between the two. I would also put a Status of "Never Married" for that "Family" - that will, by default result in the pair appearing in charts with a dotted line connecting them.

Then I'd check what the reports look like and see if it was a good idea or not.

[dewilkinson]

Adrian is quite right, it is down to personal choice, and as he says there are consequences. The only time I have entered such a thing is when there was an entry in the parish banns and marriage registers, which were then crossed out indicating that the marriage was planned, but did not happen and must have been 'cancelled' at the last minute.

I wouldn't normally bother with engagements as they don't add to the story, what about boyfriends and girlfriends? you have to draw lines somewhere. If I did include engagements I would probably just store them in note records. Adding people who never joined the family line adds an overhead, and my tree is now about 26,000 people so in order to remain manageable, we do not add family histories of people who marry into the family line, but we record their parents and previous/subsequent marriages in the individual's note, and obviously birth, baptism and census records.

At the end of the day do whatever suits you best.

[davidf]

If I come across engagements, for instance in a newspaper, I will record them. That way if I come across the event again, I know that I have got it.

Once I have found an engagement, I then try to find the marriage; if I do, I enter both the engagement and the marriage as family events. If I don't, I will try and find any formal notice that "the marriage of X and Y will now not take place". I have often found it better not to record broken engagements as family events - because that by default causes a "couple" to show on diagrams. To mark the relationship as "never married" puts the "couple" on a similar status to a couple who chose not to marry (although the latter should be shown as "unmarried couple"). By not coupling them, you can also avoid diagrams showing too many "relationships".

One option that I have found is to add the fiancé as an "unrelated individual" and then in the All Tab of the main individual I add the fiancé as an Associated Person (under Miscellaneous) and describe the relationship as "fiancé (but never married)"; I can then attach the source(s) to that "fact". "Associated Person" is unfortunately not a bi-directional relationship so you have to set up the Associated Person in the fiancé's All Tab as well.

There is an element of self-censorship here; when you enter a person or event you can never be quite sure how that will get published in the future. By relegating broken engagements to Associated Persons you manage to record the event but avoid making it too stark if your data later gets shared with, for instance, an elderly child of one of the "couple"?