Terry's TMG Tips - Managing Multiple Marriages

Using Roles to Manage Multiple Marriages

This page updated 28 Mar 2005

Version note: Applies to TMG 6 & 7

We often find the need to record information about individuals with more than one marriage. TMG allows you to create an unlimited number of marriage tags to record these events, so the straightforward approach would seem to be to simply enter a new tag for each additional marriage. But this approach, if you use the standard Sentence Structures, can result in a less than satisfactory account in reports, along the lines of:

She married John Smith 25 Jan 1853 in Johnson City. She married Sam Jones 3 Mar 1861. She married Roger Ward in Rush Creek.

One can modify the Sentence Structures of the individual Marriage Tags manually to avoid this. However an easier solution, in my view, is to create some custom Roles for your Marriage Tag Type. Then when you encounter a second or third marriage, you just select the appropriate Role with a mouse click or two.

Here is how I modified the standard Marriage Tag to solve this problem. I left the standard Sentence Structures for "Principal," "Witness," "Bride," and "Groom" unchanged. I added the following new Roles, with the Sentence Structures shown:

Sentence for
Role "First:"

[P] married first [PO] <[PARO]> <[D]> <[L]>< [M]>

Sentence for
Role "Second:"

[P] married second [PO] <[PARO]> <[D]> <[L]>< [M]>

Sentence for
Role "Third:"

[P] married third [PO] <[PARO]> <[D]> <[L]>< [M]>

Sentence for
Role "Fourth:"

[P] married fourth [PO] <[PARO]> <[D]> <[L]>< [M]>

Use:

Enter the bride and groom as Principals, as usual.
When you know that for either (or both) Principals this is a second or later marriage, click on the drop-down arrow to the left of the ID Number of that person, and select the appropriate Role. Note that as soon as you do this the role of the other person automatically changes to something other than "Principal," often something inappropriate. So now click the drop-down arrow for that person and select an appropriate role for him or her. If you know this person had more than one marriage too, select "Second" or "Third," etc. If not, or if you don't know, select either "Bride" or "Groom" for that person.
If you have marked one or both Principals as having had more than one marriage, go to the first marriage of that person and change that person's Role to "First."

Once you have changed the Marriage Tag Type to add these roles, you can not only use it for new marriages you enter, but you can also go back to existing Marriage tags and apply the new roles to them as well

Notes:

I've used the traditional language of "married first," "married second," etc. You can of course modify these sentences so they appear any way that pleases you.
If you are not familiar with the use of Roles, the discussion in my Roles Tutorial article may help.

For help with creating the Sentences involved, see my article on Modifying Sentence Structures.

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