Musings - inexperienced folk failing to notice abreviations before dates

[Susan Cocker Hopkins]

I'm referring to abt, bef, aft . I try to always put in some estimate of a birth date when I enter someone to at least roughly place them in an era based on what clues I have about them. This is more likely to happen with spouses or children of side relatives. My problem is with people, who are not experienced, looking at my information and not noticiing those qualifiers. Instead, they assume I'm being exact. They don't see that I'm purposely being inexact, that an idea is better than nothing, and that was the best I could or wanted to do at the time. Since these abbreviations are built into Reunion, and likely other software, I don't see a way around this. I suppose that, if I'm sending someone a report, I could put a qualifier in at the beginning in the Word report.

[Susan Freas Rogers]

This might help a little: when I'm just guessing, I put a question mark after the date, e.g., 1780? Reunion has no trouble with the question mark symbol. Then, in the memo field, I write something like, "guessing year based on birth date of first child" (such as if I'm estimating a marriage date, or a birth year of a parent). If your memo field prints out in your reports, whoever is reading it will see that you were only guessing at the year and what you based your guess on.

I use abt, bef and aft only when I have an actual date that is reliable to base it on. For example, you have only the baptism, so the birth is "abt MM YYYY" (obviously they might have been baptized years after their birth, but I'd say that's a big exception to the rule). Other firm referent dates might be from a will date, from a proven marriage date to a second spouse, etc. The point is to only use abt, bef and aft when you can link your approximate date to a known, proven date. If you're just guessing, use the question mark and record why it's a guess..

I'm like you, I always try to guess an unknown birthdate, because otherwise you look in your People list at all the Johann Millers and are trying to attach a newly found record, you can waste time clicking on the "no date" people, only to find they are 100 years off the record you found.

Beyond doing something like the question mark+memo field entry, you will never be able to control or ensure how others will interpret your work. Some people will not pay attention to what you write no matter what you put at the top of your report. But I hope these ideas might help you.

[John M. Leggett]

"(...obviously they might have been baptized years after their birth, but I'd say that's a big exception to the rule)." That's why among us Baptists who are always baptized much later than shortly after birth the date of baptism is useless for determining the date of birth. In my experience, I find that many Baptist churches don't even keep a record of births, baptisms or dates.

[Susan Cocker Hopkins]

Useful suggestions and observations. Thanks ! I'm reminded by this experience of confusion on the part of a reader that it's useful to learn of problems. I don't know that I'll live long enough to prioritize and improve on things in my several files. But I'm now more aware. To expand on the topic, there was a time when Ancestry had an e-mail newsletter with genealogical techniques. One issue was about using life events to make guesstimates about life dates. Maybe it's there in their archives. But, for the heck of it, I googled something like "estimating dates in genealogy" and found several articles online. Here's just one of them: https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org...ogical-writing.

[Joe Finnegan]

The GEDCOM standard defines specific uses for "about", "calculated", and "estimated":
ABT = About, meaning the date is not exact.
CAL = Calculated mathematically, for example, from an event date and age.
EST = Estimated based on an algorithm using some other event date.
Not to say that I'm consistent with this, but it's something to strive for. From what I can tell, Reunion explicitly supports About, but not Calculated or Estimated.

[Off-topic] Similarly, GEDCOM defines "child", "infant", and "stillborn":
CHILD = age < 8 years
INFANT = age < 1 year
STILLBORN = died just prior, at, or near birth, 0 years
Out of the box, Reunion supports "Died as Child" and "Died as Infant" as a child status; if necessary, you can define a status for "Stillborn".
Again, something to strive for.

Joe

[B Jansen]

The GEDCOM standard defines specific uses for "about", "calculated", and "estimated":
ABT = About, meaning the date is not exact.
CAL = Calculated mathematically, for example, from an event date and age.
EST = Estimated based on an algorithm using some other event date.
Not to say that I'm consistent with this, but it's something to strive for. From what I can tell, Reunion explicitly supports About, but not Calculated or Estimated.

[Off-topic] Similarly, GEDCOM defines "child", "infant", and "stillborn":
CHILD = age < 8 years
INFANT = age < 1 year
STILLBORN = died just prior, at, or near birth, 0 years
Out of the box, Reunion supports "Died as Child" and "Died as Infant" as a child status; if necessary, you can define a status for "Stillborn".
Again, something to strive for.

Joe

Thanks, Joe!

Yes, exactly. I really, really, really wish Reunion would adopt the GEDCOM standard formats for dates which were established a very long time ago. There isn't any good reason not to be compliant on this issue.