Guest list at Marriage Event

[elevator 0]

I have quite a few family marriages for which I have rather extensive guest lists. Some of these have 400+ individuals with a large number of them being family members recorded in my family tree. Normally when I enter Marriage tags I only record the wedding party such as Groom, Bride, their Parents, Groomsmen, Bridesmaids, Best Man, Maid of Honor, Flower Girls, Ring Bearers etc. as witnesses. I have for a long time considered creating a witness role called Guest which would enable me to record all guests to the wedding. (As a side note I have considered the same for baptisms, burials, etc also). The reason I want to do this is that it creates a more complete picture of which family members would attend such functions and creates a better "social map" of the family. However, what I want to know is if anyone is doing this; if they are doing it by adding these people as witnesses to a particular tag or if there are any other ways of doing this? Also is there a problem with adding 200+ (sometimes up towards 400) witnesses to a single tag - as far as program limitations are concerned?

 

Thank you for your help,

Ken.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Ken,

 

Have you thought about what sorts of output - reports or websites - you might use for your data? What would those look like with 400+ names attached to the marriage tag (if you include the guests in the output of the principals)? What will the reports of the family members look like if you list all the weddings and funerals they attended intermingled with the other events in their lives? Will anyone want to read that?

 

If you want to record them, I'd suggest using a separate tag rather than entering them in the Marriage tag. That way you can exclude them from printing if you choose to do so.

 

To answer you questions, I've not done that. I don't know of any reason you couldn't add 200+ witnesses, though I've never tired it. I'd think it would be a be tedious to put that many in a tag.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hmmm... Interesting question. I haven't done that, but don't see why not. I like your idea of the separate Guest role, and agree with Terry that I would probably not print the members of that role in the Principal's output sentence. In fact, I would probably make the Guest role's Witness sentence completely non-printing, just letting the tag show that role in that person's Details window. If I wanted to output something about their attendance at events I would probably create a separate tag with text in the memo I constructed based on observing all their Guest roles.

 

However, like Terry mentions, I would first consider what benefit this would give me (how would I output it, what would I do with it) before I expended the effort of all that data entry.

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

I have added my entire wedding party, but not the guests, but there's no real reason you couldn't. I know of no limit to the number of witnesses a tag can have. I would definitely use a special role so you could exclude it from printing from the wedding tag, just by editing the sentence. A separate tag might be a good idea as well.

 

I asked the same thing on TMG-L a few weeks ago because my 2nd great grandfather was a minister of the gospel and most of the weddings he performed were of people in my database already. I did add him as the minister, but don't know if I will add it to his narrative just yet. By knowing he was performing a wedding, I know where he was on a certain date, (he was a traveling minister) so it's helpful to track it.

 

I always feel anything you want to keep up with, comment on, or publish should be entered into TMG. There are ways to exclude, include, footnote, or otherwise print an item that your options are as you know limitless.

 

I wish you luck with the process though. It sounds tedious. <G>

[elevator 0]

Terry, Michael, Teresa; thank you all for your replies! I think I am ultimately going to go with Terry's suggestion of making a separate tag for guest lists.

 

As far as my reason for doing this is partly that I have a very widely spread family - geographically speaking - and special occasions such as Marriages and Reunions (and in some rare instances milestone birthdays, baptisms and burials) may be the only time when social interaction between certain family members or branches of family members take place and several family members have voiced a wish that we somehow could record information such as date, place, and reason for the event as well as photographs taken at the particular event. I would only include that part of the guest list which is in fact family - and most of these people would already exist within my family tree database - meaning that the extent of the work would be limited to adding witnesses to tags which I can do at a rate of about 1 every 5-10 seconds - robbing me of about 15-30 minutes for a 200 person guest list (plus the time it would take to add in the photographs - which I would be categorizing in some manner anyway).

 

Another possibility that I have played with is picking certain family members that is of particular interest to me (such as direct ancestors or descendants and maybe cousins and the like) and record their presence on any family marriage guest list. This would drastically reduce the work as I would not need to record entire guest lists of say 200-300 people, but maybe only a third or less. The side effect of that would be, of course, that I loose the ability to record social interaction with the distant family members which is really what I wanted to do in the first place.

 

So, yes, I am struggling a bit with the necessity of this whole project, but at the same time, we're as of yet not talking about a large quantity of events (in the vast majority of events I have no documented guest list), probably something I could finish in a few days.

 

Anyway, thank you all for your help. If I ultimately decide to do it - I will do as Terry says and go with the separate tags.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Ken,

 

A wild thought - not tested.

 

If you would like to be able to create a report of these events, you might try adding a dummy person and making that person a witness to each event. With a properly crafted Sentence you should be able to run a narrative report for the dummy person and get a listing of each event you record this way, with all attendees. Maybe something like:

 

At Bill Jones wedding to Suzie Smith on 3 May 1953 in Malibu the following were in attendance:....

 

At "Aunt" May's 70th birthday party on 12 Jul 1954 at Carmel the following were in attendance: ...

 

etc.

[elevator 0]

Thanks again for your suggestions Terry. I am going to create a new project from a sampling of the real one and do some testing on that.