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Forum Master
 
 
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I have just received the death certificate of an ancestor which states she was 88 years old when she died on the 5 October 1850. When I entered this information into the death tag it immediately copied it to the birth tag, saying she was born on 5 October 1862.
This is incorrect at two levels
1 Although a day is specified, the age at death is rounded, and so the the day of birth should not be specified
2 The age of death is almost certainly incorrect - from other sources. It was fairly common for people not to know exactly when they were born, or even if the did to report it inaccurately. With a death record, the person who should know the information is no longer available! However the age on the certificate is information that needs to be recorded; it is factual data even if the information is almost certainly incorrect in this case.
I have tried to represent this situation more accurately. The best I have been able to do is to enter a birth date of ~1768 (she was baptised with 4 siblings in 1770 with a previous family ceremony in 1764). The age at death is then overwritten to become ~82. I have had to put the certificate age of death as a comment.
I think that some way to indicate that data is calculated needs to be included. The birth date was initially in italics but changed itself to normal font
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Legendary Master
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Do you have suggestions for solving this problem?
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Famous Writer
Group: Customers
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appleshaw (3/26/2007)
The age of death is almost certainly incorrect We often have information that requires verification. I believe that the Source document should be recorded as a Source, and clearly show the discrepancy, until the solution is one day known. The relationship to Actual date of Birth, date of Death and age of individual should be correct in all aspects when recorded on the General Properties Tab, else be recorded with a tild mark to indicate that it is approximate only.
Poolzone a mere cog in a revolution
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Forum Master
Group: Customers
Last Login: Today @ 4:52:59 AM
GenoPro Version: 2.0.1.6
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Visits: 7,663
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Do you have suggestions for solving this problem?
Not knowing how the program does things I decided to sleep on this. The 'problem' arises because the date of birth, date of death and age @death are rigidly connected. My first thought was to have (yet another) check box on the death tab 'age not calculated'. Is it possible then to have a series of non-connected variables?
I have a feeling this was raised some time ago - possibly in the case of a date of birth giving an age on the display when it was possible, but unknown if the person was still alive.
I should have said that I only noticed this feature when I made a mistake in entering the date of death. I initially entered First October and then changed it to Fifth October, after looking at the certificate more carefully. I could not understand why the age at death had gone up from 88 years to 88 years 4 days as the date of birth had by then been entered as 1 October. This shows a danger of having automatic data input, which GenoPro normally avoids by making you responsible for data entry.
An alternative approach, which is nearer to the one I have finally used, is to modify the calculation when any of the data is incomplete ie only to nearest year. This happens at present if you have an approximate date of birth and an absolute date of death; the age is given in years. However the reverse does not happen.
As there are often 'mistakes' in the record of age at death I think that where there is no birth information, GenoPro should indicate that a date calculated from age at death is an approximation by entering only a year, preferably prefixed by ~.
Finally I agree with the basic idea of Poolzone Actual date of Birth, date of Death and age of individual should be correct in all aspects when recorded on the General Properties Tab . However this conflicts, in my case with We often have information that requires verification . The Data, as data, is as shown on the original documents. In this case there will never be direct information on the date of birth but the indirect evidence shows that the age given on the death certificate can not be correct. At a time when written evidence was often not produced, and with the person concerned not available, this must have happened many times.
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Legendary Master
Group: Administrators
Last Login: Yesterday @ 8:36:46 AM
GenoPro Version: 2.0.1.6
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Visits: 14,913
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appleshaw (3/27/2007)
[quote]The 'problem' arises because the date of birth, date of death and age @death are rigidly connected. My first thought was to have (yet another) check box on the death tab 'age not calculated'. Is it possible then to have a series of non-connected variables?I agree. For sure, there is room for improvement in this area.
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