I’ve struggled with figuring out how to customize fact sentences. I’ve long simply omitted marriage facts for non-married couples. That said, some cousins I’m working with insist that I document non-marriage to differentiate between couples where no marriage is known from those were non-marriage is known.
My thought is to add the description field to the marriage fact and say “never married” or other appropriate description and ignore the date, place, etc, fields when description is present. SO we have the standard:
I thought about that but this way works better when exporting to TNG. Also a couple of the “sure they never married” couples matched to marriage records on TreeShare, so it’s more convenient for my workflow.
@keithcstone Your fact sentence worked beautifully–Thank you for posting it-- unfortunately I wasn’t able to use it for the general Marriage fact as I sometimes put other things in the description field such as her sister Sally and his brother Al were the witnesses and then it doesn’t work-- I made a NEVER MARRIED fact for now but might change it to Partners BUT I understand why you would rather have it under the marriage fact..
I know you wouldn’t do this BUT for others who MIGHT be interested, you can use Keith’s sentence in the marriage fact ( for all or customize a couple as need) and in the date put NEVER MARRIED-- enter a sort date and Never Married will show up on the Couple’s family page
Depends on the situation-- before I say someone was NEVER married, I have done a very extensive search..
If it’s recent such as your niece had a baby --you basically know if he stuck around or they were married-- or if you mom-in-law says that her grandma lived with a guy BUT there was no marriage and granny never changed her name and she was listed as a widow in every census-- your documentation would be personal family info ( but I would definitely do an exhaustive search to make sure)..
Sometimes you will run across an obit that says something like Frank Smith was the father of Jack and Jane Doe BUT there is no marriage, census or earlier newspaper reports to show that he ever lived or was married to the mother–so here you documentation is the obit with lack of info from other sources…
DNA and newspaper articles can be a great source of documentation such as in the case of my hubby’s great uncle–a DNA match contacted us not knowing who his grandfather was but was able to tell me what town his grandma was from-- I had a choice of abt 5 great uncles until I found the newspaper article that said in a very nice way that this particular g-uncle was arrested for getting a girl pregnant and not marrying her…
Sometimes you will find it listed in a Baptismal record, court records or early birth records that the mother refused to name the father or the child was illegitimate (and sometimes who the father was)…
Then we come to West Virginia-- of the families I have researched from there that stayed there for a long time, I have consistently found that each family line had at LEAST one child born out of wedlock going back to as early as 1845-- most of the time, the mother had a child 3 years or more AFTER her hubby had died-- mom had not remarried- the child has the mother’s married name–in one case the child always claimed the hubby who had died was his father–in some cases the child went by one surname such as the mother’s maiden name as listed on his birth info and as adult changed his last name to the dead hubbies’ surname-- I have some where in the 1st census the child was recorded with the mother’s married name such as Jackson and in the next census, the kid’s last name is Highburg and the mom was still listed as widow Jackson.
All of these would be a combination of birth, death and maybe even marriage certificates for the kids as well as census and death info for the father-- In W VA, I also have ran across a few people who have done DNA and found out that
g-grandpa wasn’t a SMITH as he said he was–the 2nd g-grandma was who he claimed as his mother BUT her hubby was NOT the father of g-grandpa–your documentation there is DNA and lack of other sources…
Your reasoning is exactly why I’ve avoided stating people were never married and simply not put in a marriage fact. As of late I’ve been receiving data from cousins who insist that I document that so-and-so were never married instead of leaving the marriage fact absent, so I’ve complied by putting a marriage fact in with “never married” in the description which generates the desired narrative, with the source being the individual that sent me the information.
This method also fits well into my workflow, and if a marriage record does show up in the future I can simply modify it via Treeshare and all is well. An example of this would be my eldest brother-in-law, who lived for years with a Brazilian woman but never married until he became ill and realized his partner would be left in a difficult situation as an unmarried partner so they quietly married a year or so before he passed.
