Husband / Wife married twice to each other

Mr. Thomas married Ms. Hathaway in 1848. They lived happily and had 5 children. After 25 years, they decided to marry again. in 1873. RM is suggesting (little red dots) that their 5 children were all born before parents married. The only thing I can think of to convince RM otherwise, is to enter the 2nd marriage with a custom fact such as “2nd Vows” or “Vows Renewal” or some silly thing like that. Is there another “official” way to handle this? Thanks for your consideration!

if you are referring to the “problem” indicator – you can click on and select “Not a Problem” also you edit what is defined as a problem (but you may want be cautious as the Hathaways are likely unique outliers

I would prefer to have a solution rather than just ignoring it, as it may affect my Ancestry tree as well. For now, I have used a fact “Vow Renewal” to resolve the issue. I certainly do get a lot of “parents married after person’s birth” problems. As for this: (but you may want be cautious as the Hathaways are likely unique outliers), it went over my head. Thanks folks. :slight_smile:

Uncheck the following option in the Problem Options screen -or- uncheck Problem Alerts completely in General Settings screen.

Thanks so much folks for your help. I like the problem alerts, they help me keep things squared away, so I don’t want to turn them off. My comment about getting a lot of those children born before their parent’s marriage was a statement about my family tree. There was more “have kids now, get married later” than I expected in those days. Just came up with the same situation again on a dear friend’s profile - he passed away recently. His parents married twice - 25 years apart. Going to do the “Vows Renewal” for them too. Cheers All! And thanks again. -Marti

This sounds like a renewal of vows for a happily married couple. I have one couple in my database who married, divorced, married a second time, divorced a second time, and married a third time. It seems to me that in this situation, the real Marriage fact and real Divorce fact should be used for all of the events.

If there are children in this situation, then the situation is quite real and could raise RM’s problem flag if the children were born before either the second or third marriage. I don’t see any reason not to simply declare the situation to not be a problem. And for that matter, lots of children are born before a couple’s first marriage. In that case, RM is simply warning you of a possible data entry error. It’s not really making a value judgement about the births of the children being before the marriage. Therefore, “not a problem” simply means you entered the data as you intended and that there was not a typo in your data entry.

I can’t think of any reason why Ancestry couldn’t handle this situation or any similar situation just fine.

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The poster stated:

Being as this is just metadata (ie. not recorded ~ just a Problem Alert) and there are numerous users who list step, adoptees, fosters and such involved in multi-marriage settings… wouldn’t there still be value in a warning?

The warning usually happens on the children; if there are 5 of them, there are five warnings; 12 children, 12 warnings, etc. In my case, they weren’t divorced/remarried, but rather a celebration of 25 years together. If there was a divorce perhaps the RM algorithm would react differently. Only twice in 3,000+ people. As I said, I do use the problem list. I ran that tool and got 4 1/2 pages of “problems”. Now I have zero. I also checked my Ancestry tree to correct the errors there as well. Now I’m going to “sync” the two and see what happens. Cheers! - Marti

@martisiq --hubby’s grandparents were married–had 2 kids–then divorced and married again and later divorced again and married other people-- the solution to your problem is to go in and mark the very 1st marriage as PRIMARY-- and click on the checkmark to save

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THANK YOU! That’s exactly what I was looking for! It worked, yeah! Now if I can just remember it for the next time :smiley: Cheers - Marti

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I think you may have mistook my intent of the message. My point was whatever action you take needs to address your problem without messing up other things and should not be overly complicated. Kbenson described one solution which I suspected might not work for you.

so you can “clear” specific problem alerts one case by case basis by clicking on the alert icon and choose “Not Problem”.

Okay, I gotcha. Thanks for your input. It is always welcome! - Marti

Thank you. Your explanation makes sense and I do sometimes punch that “not a problem” button. But if there is a solution to make RM recognize “the problem” differently, then I’d prefer to use that. I just ran into the situation again with a 2nd cousin. His parents married 8 years after he was born. I’ve never heard of his father or mother having been married before, and I haven’t found a “first wife” and there were never any whispers about an out of wedlock child, and so, I have marked it “not a problem.” Thanks for your help! You explain things so well. Sometimes its easy to lose sight of the purpose for the warning flag. Cheers - Marti

Are you sure the first Ms Hathaway hasn’t died and he married a sibling. I’ve seen that happen.

Not the case here, but thanks for the suggestion. - Marti