castlehillwizard

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. After several optimize and VFI plus setting No Threshold and Blank Surety VCF is now behaving itself again!

I am using WinVista 64 bit with TMG 7.04 and VCF Build Date: Sep 1 2007 21:01:58 [3, 2, 0, 13] (Gold). Up until a few days ago all was well with vcf but now it appears to have got a mind of its own! If I try to produce a descendant chart it allocates children between the known wife and an invented "Unknown Person". I have done nothing to any of the relationships that I am trying to chart since the last time I succesfully did it. I have tried deleting the child/parent link and reinstating but that does not affect the outcome and I have run file integrity with no reported errors. Anyone got any bright ideas? Paul

Hi Michael, Well, as you say "a matter of opinion" and whilst I entirely agree that the two events are distinct there is nevertheless a single trigger for burial which is death - unless you happen to have one of the few ancestors who were buried alive! Compare the treatment of birth & baptism, also two distinct events, and death/burial is inconsistent. Thus creating a custom tag for DeathasBurial or whetever is simply a workaround for the fact that in 99.99% of pre-1837 cases in England there will be no death date in the same way that there is no birth date. Best wishes, Paul

Thanks guys I appreciate your assistance. The next obvious question is why are we struggling with "work arounds" to produce something which, for anyone with family histories pre-dating periods where date of death is common (1837 in the UK), should simply be a logical extension of the software "IF no death tag THEN use burial tag"?? I have 18,000 entries in my database with about 40% pre-dating 1837 and I don't fancy re-editing that lot to work around the problem - perhaps an enhancement in Version 8? Paul

In the one line summaries of "Father" & "Mother" in Person Details View and "Sibling" & "Spouse" in the Siblings pane and "Children" & "Spouse" in the Children pane is it possible to have the Burial tag date (year) shown if there is no Primary Death Tag? I find it frustrating going back to people that I seem not to have "finished" when in actual fact they died before 1837 and the best we can do in the UK is generally the date of burial. I realise that I could enter bef "burial date" into a superfluous death tag but that would be redundant for all other purposes, except of course that the same applies to the Project Explorer. Paul Paul Ballard TMG Gold V7 UK