There a few of my couples that are married, but the marriage fact is not appearing on the spouse. When I try to add to the spouse, the message is that the fact already exists. But how to get it to show on the spouse is my questions. I am sure this is an easy fix.
Knowing that we can add multiple marriage facts to the same spousal couple… something does not sound right in the limited info you’ve provided. RM does not display a message about the fact already existing when I add multiple marriage facts to the same two folks. Maybe a few screenshots or describing more completely where in the process of steps the error is presented or the view that does not register the marriage fact …might clarify.
The scenario you describe sounds impossible. As kbens0n mentioned, the same couple can have more than one Marriage fact. I have one couple in my database who married and divorced, married and divorced a second time, and married a third time.
I wonder if you are trying to add the same person as a spouse a second time. RM will definitely try to prevent that. It may seem like the same thing, but adding a spouse to a person and adding a Marriage fact to a couple are two very different things.
A screenshot of your situation is essential.
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Did not see logical to me either. When I come across one again, then I will capture the screens.
Have these people or their marriage facts come from an Ancestry Tree? I vaguely recall being surprised to see in the early days of TreeShare what I would call an irregular or rogue Marriage fact type that came from Ancestry. It was an Individual-type rather than the built-in Family-type. Have a look at your list of Fact Types and see if you have more than one named “Marriage”.
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Good point. There are no objects in RM I know of that can’t have duplicate names.
From bitter experience I know that one needs to be careful with Ancestry marriage hints, particularly those from civil record indices. If you have a marriage fact for a couple (maybe with a birth certificate or other source) you will often get Ancestry hints that give the civil record index. We all like to get rid of those accursed green leaves on profiles so look at the hints. If we accept the marriage index hint it will almost always add an additional marriage fact to just the one spouse with no option to link it to the other fact or person, although if there is just one couple on the index page it may well add the existing spouse as a new person too. If you uncheck the fact you can still download the source only and add it to the existing marriage fact. That’s how it works for UK indices, which normally have 4 to 6 people per index page, anyway. I assume it’s the same for other countries. As Tom says, it’s worth looking and deleting the rogue fact or merging the duplicated person.
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That’s an interesting aspect of this question.
When RM first began supporting Web hints, I was of a mind set to chase down every hint with a goal or either rejecting the hint because it was not applicable to my person, or else accepting the hint and incorporating that data from the hint into my database.
I soon came to realize that this approach wasn’t practical for me. For one thing, I usually already had the data from the hint entered into my database. But more importantly, I came to realize that I really couldn’t manage the hints very effectively. For example, I couldn’t really search for people in my database who had unprocessed hints. I wanted to process all the hints and to treat the hints as sort of my “to do” list. But that’s simply not the way hints work. They are much more ad hoc and catch as catch can.
In any case, I still use the hints and I use them a lot. But I don’t stress over them. I look at them sometimes. I don’t look at them sometimes. And in the case of Ancestry and FamilySearch, if I look at them then I usually look at them from within Ancestry and FamilySearch, not within RM. Indeed, I use the relatively new Right Click > Jump To > Jump to Ancestry and Right Click > Jump To > Jump to FamilySearch tools much more than I use the actual hints icon in RM. I do subscribe to MyHeritage and I do use their hints using the hints icon from within RM. But I didn’t subscribe to FindMyPast to use their hints because I found that MyHeritage and FindMyPast were so similar that I didn’t need both.
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The only time you should have a message that the marriage already exists is if you are adding a spouse to a person and not a marriage fact. If you try to add the existing spouse a second time it gives the message “These two people are already linked as a couple. If they were married twice to each other you can add a second marriage fact.”
Instead of adding a spouse, open the Edit Person screen for one of them and then add the marriage fact. You can add multiple marriage facts to the same couple.