* married woman as marriage witness

AS allows faster and more convenient creation of source records for Family Historian.
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Iant
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married woman as marriage witness

Post by Iant »

I'm not sure if this has been brought up before. When entering a married woman, known to be married in FH, as a marriage witness, she is not shown by her married name in the auto text. This can be edited of course. However, in FH she is still known by her maiden name. So, when, for example, generating a narrative report for one of the marriage partners, the witness name is the maiden name and not her married name, which is how she signed her name in the register. Again the report can be corrected afterwards, but it would be preferable if the marriage status could be recognised automatically.
Ian
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AdrianBruce
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Re: married woman as marriage witness

Post by AdrianBruce »

It has been brought up before at diverse times and in diverse places - the point is that the use of the birth name is a convention that is used massively across genealogical circles, so swapping it for the married name would upset a lot of people.

That said, it would be useful indeed if it were configurable, then people could make their own choice which convention they follow.

But if that idea were to take off, I would suggest that it would be sensible to have dated alternative names since automatically generating a married name from the husband's name is plain simple wrong in more and more cases these days.

And, just to add to the interest, which name would you use in the case of someone with two alternative names? For instance Judi Dench would have a dated marriage name of Judi Williams but her (dated?) professional name would remain Judi Dench. Not just women but the occasional bloke runs into perversity of naming - it would seem perverse to create a genealogical report for Archie Leach, when you really meant Cary Grant - but equally odd to say that "Cary Grant was born in Bristol" when Archie Leach was.... Perhaps I should go and lie down.

I still think dated (not possible in GEDCOM currently) alternative names are useful along with some sort of switchable convention about which to use. But it's got limits, I think....
Adrian
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tatewise
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Re: married woman as marriage witness

Post by tatewise »

You have combined two issues into one posting, which complicates the reply.

The AS Auto-text is one issue that will no doubt be answered by Nick Walker.

The Narrative Report issue can be fixed by changing the FH Witness Sentence Template.
Use the {=TextIf(...)} function to test the %FACT.DATE% and if after the woman's Marriage Date then use her husband's surname, otherwise use her default maiden surname. That may need to be nested a few times to accommodate multiple marriages. If you need help with the Expression then post in the General Usage Forum. See also how_to:understanding_expressions|> Understanding Expressions where we could post the final solution as an example. But as Adrian says the general rule may not fit all cases.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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NickWalker
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Re: married woman as marriage witness

Post by NickWalker »

Hi Ian

You're right that AS could do some checks and make assumptions regarding the married name of a witness, this is perhaps something for a future version. However, as you said, this is very easy to correct and my advice is always that you should only regard the auto-text as a starting point for your transcript which will inevitably need a number of changes.

Best wishes

Nick
Nick Walker
Ancestral Sources Developer

https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/ancestral-sources/
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Iant
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Re: married woman as marriage witness

Post by Iant »

Thanks for the responses, & apologies for delay in replying.
Ian
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