Behold does some of that already. If there are no dates, then births will come first, then living events, then the death, and then a few post-death events (burial, cremation).

But in the long run, I think all dates (for at least births and marriages) should be estimated as best as possible and indicated as estimated. I hope to allow an option in the future for Behold to do the estimation for you. This would be very valuable, because it will point out inconsistencies and possible problems in your research.

Louis

Tony

I don’t mind (and maybe even like) giving a single event, e.g. Birth with the “preferred” place and date attached to it, then including all the evidence and alternative dates within the notes or subtags of the event.

But the GEDCOM standard strongly recommends including conflicting events separately. I think their reasoning is that each of the dates and places can then be indexed and found, whereas that would not be possible if they are embedded in custom notes.

Both methods work and is really a user preference. The GEDCOM standard tells programmers what to write to the GEDCOM file. That need not be the same as what the programs allow their users to enter. Behold will easily allow either preference, and then just make sure it outputs the data to GEDCOM (or BetterGEDCOM) in a compliant way.

Louis

At least in part, I see this as the classic “combined” (record data) vs “conclusion” (person) issue.

One conducts research and gathers various records that relate to their person of interest. These records contain incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information, and so frequently, conflicting information related to the same event.

Selecting a “preferred” record from a host of records when each is only partly correct doesn’t resolve the conflictes. Not only that, but in traditional genealogical reporting then results in those “lesser” records will frequently go unreported … so the evidence gods gave us the proof argument.

Short of solving the proof puzzle (which I think BetterGEDCOM hopes to do), my desire to preserve all the evidence (direct, indirect, negative, conflicting) and still generate a genealogy, Rather than create the alt event tags/pfacts, I create a single pfact and report the various evidence in a series of citations that point to the single pfact.

However, there is a difference between your example, which is talking about the order that you find and enter your data into the program, and the order in which the program outputs the data. GEDCOM implies that the program should provide assistance to allow the user to order the events, and thus order them so that the most sure event is listed first when exporting to the GEDCOM. That need not be the order in which they were found or entered.

Louis

You said “. But that is wrong for multiple specifications of a single event, e.g. birth, where GEDCOM says the order of the listing of the event is significant.”

The ordering of the listing of the event can only be significant in comparison to another like event and both events were entered at the same time. Take this scenario…

1). I find a 1900 census where it shows John Doe’s age as 5 (Birth would be 1895)
2). Six months later I find a transcription of a bible page that says john was born in 1899
3). A year after that I finally find the original bible page and it actually says born 1894.

Just because I happened to find the census first and entered it first (due to lack of any other information) doesn’t, imho, give it more significance than the other two events.

My firm belief is that *all* genealogy programs should totally disregard the order of event entry into the GEDCOM and deal only with the actual dates of the events and not the date or order they were keyed into the GEDCOM. Anything else is, as Dr. Spock would say, illogical.

Now I’m thinking that maybe I’ll not bother at all with grouping the events in the Source Details section and just go by date there as well. It is expensive (time and memory) for Behold to maintain the sorting both ways, and it seems to me that the events would be easy to pick off because they’re always first on the line.

I took a quick look through the list of GEDCOM tags (nothing in-depth, just a quick pass over them), and the only events that might truly happen only once are birth and death (assuming folks don’t document near-death experiences with the DEAT tag). Cremation might also happen only once–but then again….maybe not? Burial certainly happens more than once, especially when a cemetery is moved. Other things that don’t commonly happen more than once (e.g., naturalization, bar mitzvah, baptism), could happen more than once. John Doe could have two christenings for some esoteric reason. He could immigrate to and get naturalized in more than one country over the course of his life.

In the end, birth and death might be the only two you could treat as singular events. Of course, I might have missed one or two others in my quick once-over of the list.