Nick Shelley 0 Report post Posted January 18, 2007 I am sure that I am missing something obvious ...! I have created a custom witness sentence to a death tag designed to show an early child death in the parents' narrative. The sentence structure is: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:][PF] <only lived to be [A] and >died <[D]>. The father in this case had two sons by his first marriage, both of whom died young, as did his first wife. Both children have full birth dates and full death dates, viz. Thomas born May 30 1770, died Jan 21 1771, and Sampson born Sep 8 1772 and died Mar 6 1780. In each case these tags are primary. However the father's narrative reads: "Thomas died on Jan 21 1771 ... Sampson only lived to be 7 and died on Mar 7 1780" How can they give different outputs? Nick Shelley Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Michael Hannah 0 Report post Posted January 19, 2007 (edited) Whether TMG can calculate an age is dependent upon what is entered as the date (not sort date) in both the primary tag in the Birth group and the tag with the age variable in the sentence. There has been much discussion on this calculation, and TMG even changed the behavior of [A] for version 6.02 only, but reverted in 6.03 to the following behavior. The [A] variable produces output in years only when both the primary tag in the Birth group and the tag that contains the [A] variable contain the full (day, month, year) dates, and the age is over one year. In your case Thomas has an age of less than one year, so there is no output. If either date has an appended question mark, then the age will have an appended question mark. It returns no value when the age can not be precisely calculated (e.g. incomplete dates that have only the year). If the [A] is bound by conditional brackets “” then the sentence variable is ignored for incomplete dates or an age under one year and no age is output. An unconditional use of the variable will return “at an unknown age” for incomplete dates. The [AE] variable will produce an exact age (years, months, and days) if both dates are complete. It will still produce output even if only approximate dates are known, but it will be only years. The TMG documentation calls [AE] an exact age variable, I choose to call it an exact or estimated age variable. There is currently no variable to always output just years regardless of the completeness of the dates. You are not alone in finding these age sentence variables confusing. Hope this helps. Edited January 19, 2007 by mjh Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
