Data entry with 5 marriages and a repeat spouse?

He married 5 times. He married the 3rd wife twice, in other words before and after the 4th wife. I have a date and document for their second marriage but not for their first, i.e. his third. I know she was the third because they had two children and I know their dates. While he was married to someone else (his 4th) she kept his surname.

I'm inclined to put their second marriage into Events and leave the marriage information blank. What do you think?

Comments

  1. You would not be recording the facts!

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  2. I would enter it as a marriage, and approximate the date, my source would clearly lay out why I was approximating the date and how I came up with the date.

    I would want it to show in the list of marriages.

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  3. Paul Featherstone
    Yes, I would be recording the facts, it's just a matter of where.

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  4. Carol Stevens
    That's a point. In order to get it into the marriage list I would have to enter her twice. Once with her maiden name and once with her previously married name. Is that what you mean?

    This family just gets weirder by the minute. One son's wife's parents are listed as Clarence and Eugene. Which one would you guess might be the female? And just in case you're wondering they would have been born around 1900.

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  5. No, I would NOT add her the second time as someone with her previously married name.  She is STILL "Beverly MaidenName"  in my data base.

    ALWAYS.  Her other marriages  show up on her side of the "bed", err, data base.

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  6. Carol Stevens
    You're right. My thinking's going a little goofy here. Have you ever noticed some families seem jinxed when it comes to records? NOTHING ever makes sense. There's a father who's sometimes called Sr in the records and sometimes called Jr. and a son named the same who's sometimes called Jr and sometimes called II. And yet NOWHERE in the census records covering 3 decades, 5 marriages and 11 children is he ever even named. So I still have to figure out who he is by the process of eliminating the other sons. Further confused by the fact that father and son died in the same year within 3 months of each other.

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  7. I already had her married to HIM the first time before I found another marriage certificate. Just recording what I'm finding and wondering how. So I will put their second marriage as a Remarried Event.

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  8. It is this sorta fun that makes us addicted and crazy about research!  :-)

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  9. I hate this family. There's a Julian (M) in one census record and a Julia (F) in another one. And still no what's-his-name Jr. or II or whatever his name is but he does have a wife that his father didn't marry for a change.

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  10. Carol Stevens I think what's-his-name must be the Julia or Julian because there's no-one else available. So the way this went, I'm imagining, is that they named him Julian, then gave him a nickname which he proceeded to use on all recorded documents from that day forward and Julian fell into obscurity never to be seen again except in two census records.

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  11. I see similar types of "activity" in my southern families, especially those that were from Isle of Wight County Virginia.  Add to this mix, the prevalent use of ONLY initials for the given and middle name, use that went on for years, spanning 2 to 5 census enumerations.  And, oh, they did change their names to nicknames too.  Martha = Polly.  Martha on the 1850, and Polly on the 1850 slave census, same lady.

    SIGHHH

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  12. Carol Stevens
    That explains it. These people had ancestors from the Isle of Wight, VA. Or so I've heard.

    And did I mention the daughter who has two death dates 4 months apart?

    As luck would have it, I've recently 'met' a cousin whose family this is. Well, descended from her great-grandfather so that's practically siblings. Somewhere in the 20,000 documents, (and that's a quote, not my exaggeration) she's acquired from her mother's house after her death, maybe she can tell me something. On the other hand, if she has to search through all that paper (which I've heard is in no particular order) maybe she can't.

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