Entering marriage banns into my database – one fact or three? Most genealogy programs support Marriage Banns facts. In GEDCOM it is the MARB tag, associated with a date and a place. Banns were a: > Proclamation or public notice given in church of an intended marriage, in order that those who know of any impediment thereto may have opportunity of lodging objections. In England, banns were usually published on three consecutive Sundays. Do you enter three identically sourced facts with just a different day, or do you just create one fact for the event? Neither way is ideal. In the first method, it seems very redundant and not particularly useful to have three nearly identical facts. In the second method when using only one fact, which date of the three do you decide to enter? What are the best practices for handling marriage banns events in genealogy databases?

I would enter this as one fact. I would use the date form: FROM date1 TO date2 and put the individual dates and description in the notes.

My reasoning is that I would want to keep all the info and sources about these very related events together to make analysis easier.

This also avoids repeating some of the same information several times.