The following article is from DearMYRTLE’s mailing list and is copyright 2006 by DearMYRTLE. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at www.DearMyrtle.com.
From: Rene
DearMYRTLE,
My great-grandparents, Allan and Eunice, married and had one child, Melvin. They divorced, each of them marrying other people and having children with their second spouses. After the deaths of the second spouses, Allan and Eunice married again, although they did not have any more children. How should I record their second marriage in Legacy? Do I add another spouse and link it to the same people as the first? Would this require another family group record?
DearRENE,
Ol’ Myrt decided to forward your question to Geoff Rasmussen, the Legacy Family Tree software guru, so you could have his opinion as well. Here’s what he said:
"Great question. First, remember that every piece of information and every relationship should be recorded. Fortunately, Legacy, and most other genealogy computer programs make this easy. Follow these simple steps:
- In the Family View, with Allan highlighted, click on the Add menu. Then click ‘Wife to Allan’. Fill in her new information.
- Now, Allan and his second wife will appear in the Family View. From here, you can add their children.
Do the same for Eunice’s other marriage [and children.]
In my personal genealogy, my 4th great-grandfather, Asa BROWN married Elizabeth REYNOLDS. They had four children before Elizabeth died. Asa then remarried to Eleanor HUFFMAN. They had five children. So Asa had children by two different wives. All of these children grew up together. But looking at the computer screen, it is not easily apparent, unless you turn on Legacy’s option to show 1/2 siblings. With this option turned on, you’ll be able to see all of the kids from these marriages. Now, in your research, you are more likely to remember to search for all of the children.
To turn on the 1/2 siblings feature of Legacy Family Tree, just right-click on any of the children, click on View, and then click on ‘Show 1/2 Kids’.
Thanks, Geoff Rasmussen
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And so, DearRENE, Ol’ Myrt agrees that you need to add each additional marriage in your genealogy management program, since the event places these individuals in a specific place at a specific time.
In your case, if we don’t document the now third marriage (the 2nd between the same individuals) it would make it hard to understand why the Eunice dies with Melvin’s last name. In fact we would never have anticipated this name change, since it is unusual, though not unheard of, for people to remarry much later in life.
Without such documentation, the resulting name change would go unnoticed, and would adversely affect our ability to locate:
- Eunice’s obituary
- Eunice’s tombstone
- Eunice’s probate records
Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt 🙂
Peter and Georges,
Thanks for helping me understand the question. Its phrasing was a bit ambiguous.
There are probably two methods of doing this:
1) In the marriage information screen, create a new event with the name of “Remarriage”, then fill in the details.
2) Add a new spouse to the husband, but link him to the same women, thus creating two marriages, two family group records, and two MRINs. This might be the way to go, especially if the couple had additional children during their second marriage.