Community guideline needed on proper use of Marriage End Date

Question

Using a spouse's death as the marriage end date seems to be a reccuring topic on the G2G feed. There is a lot of conflicting opinions about wether it shoud be limited to divorce and annulment dates. I can't find any community guideline on the topic.

2014: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/114413/what-is-the-proper-use-of-marriage-end-date-on-wikitree

2017: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/385163/should-marriage-end-date-only-be-for-divorce

2019: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/854099/marriage-date-would-great-someone-could-explain-this-field and https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/760882/marriage-end-date

I think the main argument for using a spouse's death as the marriage end date is to see the period of widowhood between marriages right away on the profile. Myself, I find it convenient for research and disambiguisation purposes.

Can we decide on an official community guideline and make it visible on Wikitree Help pages and Marriage Edit Page?

Comments

The other side of this is people entering wrong dates which other users take as fact. Unless there is divorce or death of a spouse and remarriage, best left blank, imo. The field is blank in the vast majority of profiles. Yes, a very old discussion on WT.

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I tend to only enter a marriage end date when there is a following marriage.  It can be useful when sorting out which children belong to which spouse.

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I only enter marriage end dates for marriages that ended for a reason other than death.

Answer 1

I agree, I only enter an end of marriage if there is a second marriage, I think there is only one divorce that I know about for an ancestor and that person is not yet profiled on WT. So all the second marriages I have entered are because a spouse died.

If there is a second marriage entered and no end of marriage date is entered for the first marriage, does anything untoward happen?

Comments

No.  It just looks as though it was a polygamous union.

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Thanks Melanie, I had no idea at all if there would be a problem

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It's not a problem, as such.

There are many LDS / Mormon marriages where the man had multiple wives at the same time, not one after the other as in the case  of death and/ or divorce.

Using an end date when it is the date of death of a spouse is purely for the look of things.  The system / database doesn't care - so there is no problem.

My father was married three times.  My mother was the second wife.  I added the death of the first wife so my mother's marriage looked "normal" to my eyes.  I added the divorce date to her marriage so, again, it looked "normal" to my eyes when I added my father's third wife.  (Then I hid my mother's marriage to my father because the system insists on labelling her as the "wife of", when the marriage ended decades before the divorce and he was neither father nor husband.)

"Normal" for me is monogamous unions; but, as already stated, that was not always "normal" for everyone.  (It also wasn't normal for bigamous unions, where one party truly believed they had a legal marriage that was  later found out to not be so.)

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Interesting choice, Melanie.

But when I look at the data section of your father's profile, it appears he was only married twice, I have to scroll down to the narrative to see he was actually married three times.

I understand the feelings that led to your choice, but from a genealogy perspective on a single family tree, isn't it more accurate to not hide the second marriage?

I realize this could be a sensitive topic, but I'm genuinely curious about how we balance our feelings about our family members with genealogical accuracy. (I can imagine members of my own family I'd like to hide...)

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When I am dead and gone - if my kids don't accept management of the profiles I currently manage - the marriage of my parents can be unhidden (as can my own first marriage) by whoever becomes the profile manager/s.

Until then, unless the system is changed to say "married Name on date, at place" instead of "wife of" and "husband of", those marriages remain hidden by family choice.  I am not my ex-husband's wife, even if I was once.  My mother was not my father's wife for almost 30 years before they were divorced.  Having it show her as "wife of" is just all kinds of wrong.

Genealogically — and accurately — all the information is there to show we children are the offspring of those two people.  Their biographies state they were married.  Nothing else is needed.  (And, yes, this is a sensitive issue due to many other issues revolving around my parents and their relationship - or lack thereof.)

For the record, no people are hidden, just a couple of relationships.  Nobody is hurt by those being hidden.  Nothing is lost by them being hidden.  There is no inaccuracy anywhere because those relationships are being hidden.

(And now I am curious why a 9-month-old topic was bumped.  )

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Thanks for the very thoughtful response, Melanie.  You make a really great case for why "husband of" and "wife of" should be changed. (I've got to assume that has been proposed before...)

This 9-month-old topic was "bumped" because after entering my question about the need for a warning before marriages are removed, I glanced down at Related Questions and was curious about this question.  Then I saw your response, then I looked at your birth father's profile, then... [insert rabbit hole here].

Melanie, I believe you're in Australia, right? (Your bio narrative is not visible.) I understand there is horrible flooding on the east coast. I hope you and yours are safe.

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I proposed it in the wish list a couple of years ago - with an image to illustrate how I would like it to look.  Nothing happened.  I re-wished it this year, then removed the wish as the first response was to suggest I use an app/browser extension which wouldn't do at all what I want, as it only "fixes" the profile view for those with the app/extension, and not the casual browsing cousin I may be trying to lure in.

Not in Aus - from Aus, living in the US - but my kids and grandkids are (plus sibling, nieces, nephew, cousins).  So I am safe, and I am watching as they are almost all of them east coast, and many of them south-east Queensland (the worst hit area).  It's not a new thing, this sitting and worrying.  Happens every time there are bushfires.
Thanks for your concern.  

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Oh, and -- beware those rabbits.  I hear they get rather strange in March.