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 CitationA link between a source and a fact, documenting Where within the source you find information being "cited" to support the fact/conclusion..

Usually a Method 1 or ‘source splitters’ Source record will be created with a meaningful Title, a transcript in the Text From SourceBoth Source records and Citations have a Text From Source field intended to hold transcripts of source documents., and an image linked via the MediaWhen you add a picture, video, sound recording, document file etc into a Family Historian project, a Media record is created to represent that media item within the project; the Media record includes a link to the actual Media file. 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 CitationsAutomatic Source Citation is a very powerful tool to ensure you remember to cite Sources for all your conclusions. could be enabled, and associated Individuals such as parents and witnesses, created or updated with Residence and OccupationAn occupation is defined in the GEDCOM standard as: ‘The kind of activity that an individual does for a job, profession, or principal activity’. 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)..

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, Witnesses 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 Individual Records Window, nor QueryQuerying is a very powerful feature that allows you to specify and save criteria for identifying a set of records of a given record type. or Diagram or Report, except for Narrative Reports.

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 plugin that creates synthetic facts 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 BoxThe Property Box is the primary window for data entry and for viewing details of stored records.  It is used with records of all types.  .

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 Sources 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 events 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 BMD Records plugin composes online searches for BMDAn abbreviation for Birth Marriage and Death events. records.