Multiple marriages/divorces of same couple

[Mike Hobart]

How does one handle an instance of a particular couple marrying, divorcing, then re-marrying and later divorcing yet again. Obviously one may remark on this in the notes field for the marriage, but that dos not add additional marriage/ivorce entries for the couple. With regular events one may simply add additional events in a person's event fields
9useful when there is conflicting data), but not in evententies for a marriage. Or am I missing something? I actually had another instance of distant cousins with the same re-marraige events. I am not talking about a couple renewing their marriage vows. I would simply mention that in the notes field for a marriage.

[theKiwi]

Click on the Marriage button for the couple, then go to the Events tab.

There you can create and use fields like "Second Marriage" "Second Divorce" or whatever you want to call them.

Roger

[B Jansen]

If the couple marry, divorce, then remarry without another marriage to someone else in the interim, one trick was to add a fake marriage in between so marriage, divorce, marriage to and divorce from "fake" spouse, then remarriage to the original spouse (Reunion doesn't like repeated, uninterrupted marriages).

[eric.vanbeest]

The correct way of doing this would be to create a simple second marriage, but as Bradley says Reunion does not like consecutive marriages to the same person. It's hard to create as it is, and when you close the file, Reunion will consolidate the two (or more) consecutive relationships into one. I say consecutive because if one of the partners has a different partner inbetween, you can actually create a second marriage.

The current method is to create additional fields in the Events section of the marriage. To do this, go to Preferences > Fields > Family annd create two new Marriage fields: a field named "Divorce" with the GEDCOM tag 'DIV' and a field named "Marriage" witht rh GEDCOM tag "MARR". This is so the GEDCOM output will still be read correctly. Then going back to the relationship, you would set the start of the relationship as the first wedding, then use the Divorce and Marriage fields to enter the first divorce and second marriage, leaving the second divorce as the main separation. Slightly clumsy but this works for me. (I have three couples like this)

Attached how the Divorce and Marriage fields are set up in my Family file

[PSB99]

I will try this new method for re-marriages of same spouses - thank you for posting it! I agree it is only a workaround since you cannot see the duplicated spouse in a person's list of spouses, but at least I should no longer lose multiple marriages anymore as I did with every upgrade. The inability to legitimately enter the remarriages this has been a thorn in my side since starting back with version 5. I have previously used the "add fake spouse - add duplicated spouse - delete fake spouse" method, and was able to keep the spouses in my file - UNTIL each new version of Reunion upgraded my file to the next version, and I would lose them all, so with every new version of Reunion, I had to re-enter all the remarriages. (I'm currently using Reunion version 12). Remarriages to a same spouse are more frequent than some might think. After almost 50 years of genealogy, I have over 18,000 people and I now have 13 couples who have remarried a same spouse and I have 2 who remarried the same spouse 3 times. I do hope the powers that be at Leisterpro will think about finally fixing this.

[fjvanbodegom]

Have had a comparable incident with a Dutch user in the past (upgrading 11 to 12).
Checked this (some years ago): it looks (in his situation) that this was only resent when a fake spouse is added to a female, remarriage and that there were no parents of the female. So a very very rare combination.

[PNRoss]

I have a similar challenge to the ones mentioned here. My great uncle Clyde married his wife Alice twice. After their first marriage Alice was convicted of bigamy, so the first marriage to Clyde was annulled. They then remarried shortly after. When I tried to enter this in Reunion, I ended up with two spouses both named Alice. Thank you to Eric for his workaround which I have now applied and it solves the problem, although it is not a very elegant solution as Eric concedes. Like others here, I hope Reunion can find a way to manage these situations for the future.

[wjmickelson]

I have encountered this same situation and was looking for guidance on how to handle it. If I fully understand Eric's method, am I correct in understanding that the duration of the marriage that Reunion calculates spans (and includes) the period of time between divorce 1 and marriage 2? So it could reflect 37 years in total (from 1984 to 2021 which is 37 years) versus (1984-2001) plus (2004-2021) which is actually 33 years (16 years + 17 years). Would the marriage events look something like this (see attached)? Thank you for your assistance in helping me understand this - I have several in my family and just would like to make it clear for others to understand should I not be around. Thanks again.

[eric.vanbeest]

Reunion does not look in the Events section of the relationship when calculating marriage duration. The duration is limited by either Divorce/Separation/Annulment in the Marriage section of the relationship, or by the death of one of the spouses. If the relationship started in 1984, then by 2021 Reunion would say it is 37 years, the 3 year hiatus notwithstanding.

[Myles O]

I do love humanity