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John Snelson

Death & Burial Events/Dates

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I have many cases where I have a Burial Tag Event, Date & Place ... but no date or place of Death, and consequently no Death Tag (Event). This creates a few challenges in Reports and the Second Site Index, where such persons are shown with no Lifespan Termination Date. There aren't many records of a burial without a preceding death. :rolleyes:

 

Is it possible to make a global pass of the files so that a new Death Tag Event is created for every Burial where there is previously no Death Tag Event, perhaps with an implanted Date with a prefix such as "Bef" followed by the Burial Date ?

 

I thought the TMG Utility could be harnessed to do this, but maybe not ?

 

Any help, much appreciated.

 

John Snelson

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TMG can create a list of people who have a burial tag and not death tag, but cannot add the death tags.

 

There is an Add Events feature in the TMG Utility which could add the tags for you. To use it you need to create a text file in a specific format which lists the ID#s of the people to whom you want to add the tags and the date. You could use the List of People report to generate the list of ID#s and burial dates, which you could manipulate in a spreadsheet to create an assumed death date. But I see from Help that you must specify an exact date -- "before" and "circa" dates are not supported -- so that may not be much help.

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Hi John,

 

The following does not directly address your specific question, but might be an alternative. The fact that tags in the Burial Group do not imply a death or Lifespan calculation is why many of us choose to create a custom tag in the Death group for these situations. For example, I have defined a custom tag type in the Death Group which I have named "BurialAsDeath". While its sentences only describe burial, since it is in the Death Group TMG and Second Site will use it for Lifespan calculations.

 

If you first create such a custom tag type you then could use the TMG Utility to convert all your existing Burial tags for only those people with no Death tags to this custom tag. First use the Secondary Output on a List of People report to set a Flag for these people. The filter might be something like:

 

# of Death Group tags | = Equals | 0 | AND

# of Burial Group tags | > Is greater than | 0 END

 

Then change a Flag value based on this filter. Now close TMG, and in the TMG Utility under the Events functions select "Change Event Type". Choose the From event type to be "Burial" and the To event type to be "BurialAsDeath" (which is why the custom tag type must be defined first). Be sure to go to the bottom of this screen to "Set Flag Filter". Choose the Flag you set above to "Include" only those people with the appropriate Flag value.

 

Remember to do a full backup of your project before trying any of this.

 

The advantage of this is that the "BurialAsDeath" tag will be used for Lifespan calculations. The disadvantage is that you only have one tag for the two events of Death and Burial, which means this one tag can only have one date or memo etc., and in some reports this one event is listed/abbreviated as a death not a burial because it is in the Death Group.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Thanks Terry and Michael ... I am going to give Michael's custom Tag option a whirl.

 

I will report on progress.

 

Thanks guys ... from a wet and miserable Spring morning in Sydney.

 

john

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Hello all,

 

I'm a very new user of TMG (1 month) and a new genealogist (2 months!), so I hope I'm not going to put my foot in it...

 

I have some ancestors whose date of death I only know of via the inscriptions on their tombstones. (I have high confidence these are original tombstones so I've assigned high confidence to the date of death.)

 

I entered a death tag based on the tombstone inscription to capture the date of death. I want to capture the cemetery information etc. so I tried to use a burial tag to do that. Well, whoops...

 

1) I know the date of death

2) I certainly know the location of the burial

-but-

3) I don't know the actual date of burial.

-and-

4) If I use the death tag and the burial tag I want the burial tag to be listed *after* the death tag. (Vice-versa is a bit scary to contemplate...)

 

The only way I can see to accomplish (4) is to use a date in the burial tag that's "probably close" to the actual date of burial. This gets the death and burial order right, but now there's a "made up" date knocking around in my data. That "made up" date bothers me, although guesses I've entered from other sources don't bother me at all for some reason!

 

How would you TMG experts get the order correct without making up a date? Would the single custom "BurialasDeath" tag mentioned in this thread (or something similar) actually be the way to go here?

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Brian

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You could enter a date of Aft yyyy-mm-dd. This would not be a made up date since one would hope the person wasn't buried before they died. :-) This will cause the burial tag to sort after the death tag.

 

If you don't want the After dates, then just enter a date in the sort date field that is a day later than the death. The sort dates don't display any where. They are just to control the order of the tags.

 

Sheila Altenbernd

 

Hello all,

 

How would you TMG experts get the order correct without making up a date? Would the single custom "BurialasDeath" tag mentioned in this thread (or something similar) actually be the way to go here?

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Hi Brian,

 

Sort Dates are a feature available in TMG in Advanced mode. As Sheila said, the purpose of this feature is to allow the Date of a tag to remain blank when you do not know a date, but to assign a date for TMG to use internally for sorting the tags into a desired order. That is how we "get the order correct" without making up a date for the tag output.

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Hello Sheila and Michael,

 

Thank you for your prompt replies!

 

As you can plainly tell, I had no idea how to use the sort date. (I now understand why TMG always asks about changing the sort date when I change the event date!)

 

It's time for me to get some training on TMG...

 

Regards,

 

Brian

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As a side note, that prompt is one of many that can be turned on or off in preferences.

 

Sheila Altenbernd

 

(I now understand why TMG always asks about changing the sort date when I change the event date!)

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Brian,

 

There is not a lot of training needed for Sort Dates, but you might start with the TMG Help topic "Data Entry: Dates". I have found that the best training is just to try things. Create a "New" project just for testing, then add people and try things in that separate project knowing it can do no harm to your real data.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Is there a way to have the burial tag automatically follow the death tag? It works that way on Ancestry.com and is very convenient.

 

Obviously, burial is the last event in a person's life. It certainly wouldn't precede any other event, right? That way the burial date could be left blank and not have this tag end up at the top of the other tags.

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Hi Neil,

 

make use of TMG's "Sort Date" functionality by which you can control how various events / tags are sorted i.e. in relation to other events / tags for this person. That's the only option I am aware of to do exactly what you want.

 

To be honest I am very happy that TMG does not apply any kind of automatic process simply based on the tag type which in your example would sort a burial as the "last event in a person's life" since that may be correct or may not be correct. - i.e. what about a person's will being opened after his/her burial or an obit being published in a newspaper after a person's burial?

 

 

Excerpt from TMG Help for TMGv7:

Sort Date

(Turned off in Beginner Mode)

Sort dates are used to maintain chronological order on the Person View, and in narrative reports, Individual Detail reports and Family Group Sheets. They do not print or export and have no genealogical significance.

 

To access the sort date field:

1. Go to File > Preferences > Program options: Prompts.

2. Place a check next to Access sort date field.

3. Click the Program options: Data Entry tab.

4. Select the Data Entry Mode: Advanced radio button.

5. Click [Apply] to save the change and continue in Preferences

or

Click [OK] to save the change and leave Preferences.

Edited by Vera Nagel

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Hi Neil,

 

No, there is intentionally no automatic way to cause the Burial tag to be immediately after the Death tag. But you can easily ensure the desired sequence yourself. If you don't have an actual date for the Burial, then you should enter a Sort Date for the Burial. In fact, if you don't have an actual date for any event tag of any type, then you should enter a Sort Date for that tag to ensure its narrative will output in your desired sequence.

 

As a suggestion, I have adopted a personal convention of entering the exact same value I put in the Death date into the Burial Sort Date, but appending a question mark '?' to that Sort Date. For example, Death Date might be "Circa 1823" and thus I would enter the Burial Sort Date as "Circa 1823?". In TMG any date with an appended question mark will sort immediately after the same date without that question mark.

 

Obviously, burial is the last event in a person's life. It certainly wouldn't precede any other event, right?
Not necessarily, Neil. I have a number of people with events after Burial. Two quick examples come to mind. One event is a ceremony awarding a posthumous military service medal. Other events even more common deal with the person's will and dispositiion of their estate. I am sure other users have examples of different event tags entered for a person where the date was after Burial.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Yes there can be some events after the burial like those mentioned. However, i have about 5,000 in my database and have never had one case of that. I still think it would be easier and time-saving to have burial to always follow death and for the few and seldom cases, go in and put a burial date. Without obits, I usually don't know date of burial anyway.

 

So why go to unnecessary effort 100% of the time just so something that happens 0.01% of the time will be properly sorted?

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Neil,

 

I guess we just have different ideas about what constitutes unnecessary effort. I don't want the program making any assumptions about the order of tags. I seldom find obits, but do fairly often have burial dates from death certificates or burial records. When I don't I enter a sort date, which I include in the Add Person tag for marriage and burial tags for cases when I enter them as I enter the person.

 

I do have lots of events after death. They include probate and other disposition of property, and research notes. Obits and funerals, when I record them (almost never) generally occur between death and burial, so I don't want the program to try and do something different.

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I have at least 2 cases where children were born after father's death. Of course, the father's death was accidental.

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If the burial tag was sorted to last place but you had no date, what's the problem? If you later found a burial date plus probate and other disposition of property, and research notes, entering a burial date would put it in the correct sort order wouldn't it? The same with birth tag; would you ever have events happening before someone was born? Would marriage ever happen before someone was born? Or baptism?

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