Originally published on genealogyatheart.blogspot.com on 22 Sep 2016.
About a month ago I was contacted by an Ancestry user who inquired the following: “How could George Mitchell Long marry Sarah Ford in 1807 in Tennessee when he wasn’t born until 1849?”
Excellent question! I went to my tree and checked the birth and death dates for the couple and their child and didn’t see that I had an error so I suspected my tree was confused with another; that was my reply.
Yesterday, I received a more detailed response which brings up an excellent point. Under sources, I had saved for George Mitchell Long (Jr.) his parents’ marriage record. It does not show under Facts, of course, since the marriage took place before George Jr. was born. The record does not show Jr. or Sr. either since the Sr. hadn’t yet had a son so there was no Jr. at the time of the marriage.
Why did I have the parents info on the son’s page? I put the record there so when I write kinship determinations I can pull everything from one page. I can understand how this would confuse someone looking at my tree and assuming I had the wrong information for that person’s page, though.
I do this a lot, too! I’m thinking about how the Social Security info provides kinship and I save to both the parents and their child. That is clearer since it shows the relationship that a parents marriage alone does not do.
I don’t know if there’s a better work around – if you know of one please let me know! I’ve requested that Ancestry add a feature like the shoebox to the Facts page so extraneous information could be saved and retrieved easily but I’m not holding my breath on that.
Originally, I put info that I just described under the Notes feature but I had to move it out because I was working on some lines with other family members and they couldn’t see the Notes section – it’s only visible to the owner. For awhile, I then added it as a Comment but I wasn’t scrolling down and was missing my own comments. I see that now a click on comments on the toolbar brings the comments to the right side for viewing so maybe I should go back to using that.
I’d appreciate your thoughts and suggestion…