Never Married data

I am new to RM. Running RM8. What is best way to mark a person as “Never Married” so it is not confused with missing data?

I usually write it in the Description field at the Death or Occupation. Depends what details you may have.

I use two different ways. I have a group called ‘NeverMarried’ which I add the people to. This may not be quite as obvious when looking at your data, and it isn’t going to print out on reports, so I also have a custom fact called ‘Marriage (N)’ which has a sentence template that reads something like ‘Ken never married’. The latter method can easily be seen when looking at edit screens for those people.

I also do a similar thing for people who had no children.

In both cases, one wants to make sure that there really was no marriage or no kids, not just that you weren’t able to find a marriage or children for them.

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Another advantage of a custom fact type as described by @kfunk is the ease with which it can be used as a criterion for searching, colour coding, grouping, report filtering and can be the subject of a Fact List report.

Another approach which could be useful would be a custom fact type which I’ll call “hashtags” into whose Description field or even Note one could enter in any order and quantity descriptive tags such as #nevermarried, #nokids, #brickwall, #unconnected

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This is actually something that I have considered doing but have found myself too lazy to actually do. A very useful aspect of this is that it would allow me to eliminate about 6 or 8 other custom facts that I use as ‘flags’. When I was making some notes on this topic, ‘Flags’ was what I planned to call it, however I like ‘Hashtags’ even better.

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I created an Unmarried fact; the descriptive text says [person] never married

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Hashtags may also be used in the text fields of other standard and custom fact types and those of source citations. They can be found with Find Anywhere in addition to Advanced Search. They can be enclosed in privacy braces and suppressed from reports where that is an option.

I don’t think MyRootsMagic.com has any means of searching for them nor whether a third party website such as GEDsite, Ancestry Member Tree, TNG… has any support for hashtags but it is conceivable. I make extensive use of them on my WordPress site sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com to characterise each post. A plugin generates in the sidebar menu a tag cloud, the size of each tagname proportional to its population. Another produces a complete list on a page. The tags hyperlink to a search of the site for all posts having the hash tag.

I have been contemplating the exact same issue for the last couple of weeks. What I am doing where I have positive proof that the person did not marry is to add (spinster) or (bachelor) as a suffix to the name, e.g. Ann SMITH (spinster) or John SMITH (bachelor). I am proceeding slowly so that I can easily remove the suffix if it causes any unforseen complications.

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All great suggestions. Thanks for bringing it up. Cannot tell you how many times I had to remind myself, “Oh yeah, she/he never married”. Cannot believe I did not continue the thought to a solution. Off to try out some ideas.

Definitely like the idea of hashtags. Although, one could use groups for same purpose. Either with the RM criteria, manual group, or even a group create by SQL. You could even “label group” #nevermarried. Of course the intent of hashtags would would like to do more things beyond what groups do currently.

Kevin

I’ve also created a custom fact I’ve called Indiv. Marital Status, but I’ve formatted my sentence to read something like " [Person] was recorded as [Desc.] at the time of [their] death" and put whatever their marital status is at the time in the description plus any other relevant info.

I’ve got several people that I KNOW were married and had deserted a spouse at the time they died, but were recorded either in the records or by their siblings as ‘never married’ (my grandma being one of those spouses), so the records do say one thing, but the research confirms another.

In Grandma’s ex’ case, it’ll read “[Edward Redacted] was recorded as [single, never married in the records, however had left a spouse previously] at the time of his death.”

It also lets me put in a line like ‘was living with [Margaret Redacted, as his wife]’, things like that. It makes it a bit more flexible.