Friday, October 5, 2007

Marriage Indexing: More Clarification

It’s too bad we can’t get to those county clerks who decided to use their own forms and do things differently! They sure are complicating life for this project at times.

Number of marriages – leave the field empty if the answer is first, 1st, First. If the answer is once or 2, then index it exactly as it is written. The overall rule is that we never count this marriage – we only want to know about previous marriages, if any.

License date field – can’t really do anything with it except mark it blank if no license date is given. After given different instructions earlier, I’ve realized that putting the marriage year in that field is going to be misleading to future researchers. I actually had that very problem (still do) with one of my ancestors. The license date was included with some marriage dates for other couples and it has been published on the Internet in many places as the marriage date. Once that false information is out there, it’s really hard to get the correct information accepted.

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