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Birth & Death Dates in Person Summary

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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

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The easiest way to do what you want is to create a custom "burial" tag in the Death Group. Then, for those people who you think you will never be able to find an actual death date for, use that tag rather than the standard one. When you make it primary, it's date will appear in life-spans in the various places they are displayed.

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Hi Patrick,

 

I do exactly what Terry suggests, and recommend it, but would point out some minor disadvantages this causes. I choose to have a custom "BurialAsDeath" tag in the Death group to imply the death of the single principal if a Death tag does not exist. In my case I choose not to ever use the standard Burial tag, I only use my custom tag for all burial data.

 

One disadvantage to only using my "BurialAsDeath" tag in the Death group is that the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-U) cannot be used to add this custom BurialAsDeath tag type, the shortcut will still try to add the original Burial tag type in the Burial group even if it is inactivated. Another disadvantage, which exists whenever you do not have a tag in the Burial group, is that some reports and charts (e.g. the box chart) only print the primary event from a select set of tag groups, so you would not have a tag in the separate Burial group, and only get one tag from the Death group. This is one reason why I only use my custom tag. That way I always get a Death entry but never get a Burial entry for anyone in these reports, rather than sometimes have only the death when I really have burial data but sometimes get both. Less confusing for me.

 

The primary advantage to me for this custom tag is that you do get a death date in the absence of a death tag, which seems to be what you want. Maybe the best approach is to use a custom Death tag (possibly with an excluded sentence) in addition to the Burial tag for only those people without death data, and replace it with a "real" Death tag if you discover death data. That is probably what Terry was implying.

 

Hope this helps rather than make things more confusing,

Edited by Michael Hannah

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Maybe the best approach is to use a custom Death tag (possibly with an excluded sentence) in addition to the Burial tag for only those people without death data, and replace it with a "real" Death tag if you discover death data. That is probably what Terry was implying.

Michael, I don't understand the value of excluding the sentence and adding a second "standard" burial tag. I'd think it would work well to totally replicate the standard burial tab (except with a slightly different label) in the death group. Then, in almost all charts and reports you wouldn't be able to tell which of the two burial tags was in use. But, you would have a "death" date for life-span purposes.

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I don't understand the value of excluding the sentence and adding a second "standard" burial tag. I'd think it would work well to totally replicate the standard burial tab (except with a slightly different label) in the death group. Then, in almost all charts and reports you wouldn't be able to tell which of the two burial tags was in use.
Hi Terry,

 

The point of having both the custom BurialAsDeath in the Death group (with a possibly excluded sentence) and the standard Burial tag in the Burial group is for those few reports or charts that only output the Primary tag from each group. If you only have the custom tag you will get a death but no burial. I'm with you and only use the custom tag, but some users who prefer these reports/charts may find the lack of a burial entry when they do have burial data an issue. To overcome that for these reports/charts you need a tag in both groups.

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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

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Hi Paul,

 

It may be a matter of opinion :rolleyes: but I do not view this as a "work around". It is a fundamental design concept of TMG that its default actions try to avoid as much as possible making any automated assumptions about your data. I find this one of the most important and valuable features of TMG. I would not use software that makes assumptions about my data. A Death is a Death and a Burial is a Burial. They are not automatically the same. However, TMG is so flexible that it offers options, as I described above, so that you can control how your data is handled. You can specify that this custom burial tag is like a death. As for "re-editing" your data, that does not have to be a big issue. There are various tools to do mass changes to your data based on filters.

 

I am just a user like yourself and have no relationship with WhollyGenes so cannot speak with any authority, but I highly doubt this design concept will change anytime soon.

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Another thing you can do is create a death date, and put "date unknown" (no quotes) in the date field. This will force a ? in the date field of the Children and Sibling views, but will still print as "David died date unknown..."

 

Then you can sort date the death tag to a date that is close to where you think he might have died. You can then search for everyone with "date unknown" in their death date field...

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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

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Just as TMG allows you to customize your tags to work either way for death/burial, it also allows you to customize birth/baptism to work either way. A number of societies/religions intentionally wait for some time after birth to perform baptism. Thus many of us have created a custom BaptismLater tag in the Other group just so it does not automatically appear to be a birth. While the defaults for these two pairs may be different and seem to be inconsistenct (another matter of opinion :) ), isn't it great that TMG allows the user to create custom tags to make it work however that user desires.

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Following this conversation and wishing the same result as Paul I created a Buried Tag within the Death group and using the TMG utilities converted all my Burial Events to Buried Events. However, while they are still primary events they do not appear in life spans. Is there a further step?

 

Marlene

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When you say "However, while they are still primary events they do not appear in life spans" what life spans do you mean? If you mean in charts, have you selected the option for life spans to print? It is off by default. Have you run the File Maintenance routines? I suggest at least the Optimize function. If your custom Buried tag is in the Death group, and that tag is Primary for that person, it should determine the end of the life span. Have you checked one of the people that do not show a lifespan and made sure they have both a primary tag in the birth group and a primary tag in the death group? Have you checked the dates in both tags? If the year is empty, or if the date is irregular, then no year exists for the life span calculation so you won't get one.

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I was particularly hoping that the new Buried Tag date would appear in the Death column of the Children window. The individual has a primary christening tag and a primary Buried Tag (my new one created in the Death group). When I select their parent they are shown in the Person Window with a Son-Bio Tag and the christening year appeared in Birth Column of the Children window but the Buried year did not.

I had already run the Optimise and reindex routines from Maintenance but have just now run the Validate File Integrity which is the one that worked! So now I can see if I have found burials for children without going to check everyone.

Thanks for your help Michael.

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You are most welcome, Marlene. Glad we could suggest something that worked.

 

By the way, the recommended sequence is to first run an Optimize followed by a Validate File Integrity (VFI) as a pair. Keep running those two as a pair as long as VFI says it is fixing errors. When you finally get a good VFI, then run a final Optimize as the last thing.

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Following this conversation and wishing the same result as Paul I created a Buried Tag within the Death group and using the TMG utilities converted all my Burial Events to Buried Events. However, while they are still primary events they do not appear in life spans. Is there a further step?

I am a little late to the party, but for future reference, if you use the Change Event Type feature in TMG Utility to change events such that they move into the Birth Group or Death Group, you should follow that by using the Adjust Birth and Death feature to correct the lifespan info.

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