I’m trying to find an approach that will enable me to more easily create children under the proper parents when I have a christening event but no marriage event.
Say I find a christening record for a new individual Mary. The christening record says her parents are William and Elizabeth. I search my RM for married couples William & Elizabeth in the right time and location to likely be Mary’s parents. I don’t find a good match, so I have to decide if William and Elizabeth are new people as well, or just not shown as married in RM. In this example, I happen to remember having a William - Elizabeth pair who were parents on a christening record for a Richard two years earlier in the same parish. So I decide to create Mary under this William-Elizabeth couple for now.
The problem is, searching through the plethora of very common given names is very time-consuming. And, I don’t trust my memory to actually recall a previous record every time. My thinking is, I could have created a marriage event for William and Elizabeth when I added Richard, dating the marriage event as “before” his christening date. This would make it easier to find married couples with the right names and roughly the right dates. If Mary’s christening date was earlier than Richard’s, I would update the marriage date accordingly.
Are there flaws in this approach? Is there a smarter way to do this?
If you are searching the Couple List a marriage fact is not needed. All family groups show, even single parents with a child. If you know the last name of the child I would filter the search of William & Elizabeth using it.
Example: Smith, William & , Elizabeth
or ,William & Smith, Elizabeth
No Mark-- there is no flaw in adding an approximate date for the marriage but use something like abt 1766…
I would also suggest that you associate the parents with the Church where the Christening happened-- so say Wm Jr was christened at St Mary in London, England–you could either use the religion fact or make your own with a sentence like this if you want to include the denomination of the church-- otherwise just eliminate of the…
[person] was member of the< [Desc]> < [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>< [Date]>.
So say I want to find all the people who did anything at St Mary’s in London-- I could go to places ( on the left) and then scroll down to London-- click on the arrow next to details-- then scroll down to St Mary’s and on the right it says used 8 times–click on that arrow and it shows every where used…
I make 3 Parish Records sources for each church - baptisms, marriages and burials - so I can see all those events at one church just by looking at the citations which are named to sort into date order. Or I can use the place which has the actual church as place detail
