GENBOX-L Archives

Archiver > GENBOX > 2005-10 > 1129432566


From: "Cheri Casper" <>
Subject: RE: [GENBOX] Setting Living
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:16:06 -0700
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-DAV7A55920A6DF368E6F1229E67F0@phx.gbl>


Shelley - I use a variety of dates. For example, on the 1900 census if the
mother says she has 5 children, with 5 living, but only 4 are listed, I can
assume that the 5th child was born between the date of the marriage and
1900, so I would use "bet 1878 & 1900" for the date; I may also assign a
sort date where there appears to be a large gap between children otherwise
children with these dates float to the top of the Child List. I don't see
that as corrupting my data in anyway. I also use "estimated" for marriage
dates and then in my Comment source citation, put a note "Based on the birth
of the oldest child."

Likewise, if someone's parents were born in the mid to early 1800's, I think
it fairly safe to say (1) that any child who was born was born between the
date of the marriage and the death of the parent who died first, and (2)
irrespective of any date associated with assumption (1), I think it is a
sure thing that the person is deceased, unless their name is Methuselah.

There *is* a way to override the assumption that someone is living. Create
a Flag "Deceased" and tick it. Then when you create your reports, base them
on a Query or List where you have excluded those individuals with a
"Deceased" flag. You can probably also create some queries for descendents
of people whose birthdates where "less than" a given year to facilitate
setting your flags.

CheriC

-----Original Message-----
From: Shelley [mailto:]
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2005 6:39 PM
To:
Subject: [GENBOX] Setting Living


Hello,



While I'm in a writing-to-the-Genbox-list mood, I wanted to again raise the
issue of identifying living people for reports and charts. I wrote about a
year ago on this and was referred to the archives of about June 2004 where a
discussion of "setting living" had taken place.



The outcome of that discussion seemed to be that having people with no birth
or death date be assumed deceased would be a better option than having them
assumed living. This makes sense to me, as the living flag can override a
decision that someone is dead, but there is (currently) no way of overriding
a decision that someone is living! At present I have far too many 'living'
people for the different levels of privacy to be of any use to me (and I am
not prepared to corrupt my data with estimated dates).



Are there any plans to alter the way that identification of living
individuals works in coming versions? If not, could it be considered please?



Shelley



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