How to select those who COULD be living when no birth nor death date is known?

[poised_one]

I would like to create a flag or flags to mark in Privacy settings so that my Web Project Report makes anonymous those who could be living at this time, but for whom no birth nor death date is known. Any ideas? Thanks much!

[alan]

Welcome to the Reunion forum.
If you go to the Reunion Preferences and select Privacy & Sensitivity a window opens then select > Privacy > Who is Private > check people with no death date born after; (select your year of choice )- should then make private those you are referring to.

[Howard Fink]

Another way to achieve this would be to enter a question mark in the death date field. This implies that you know the person is dead, but do not know the date. The presence of anything at all in this field will cause Reunion to treat the person as having died, and therefore they will not be considered living / private.

An advantage of this method is that you can force someone to be marked dead (if you know they are deceased), regardless of birthdate or younger age.

The disadvantage is that you will have to manually edit each person's death date event that you want to be so marked.

[poised_one]

Welcome to the Reunion forum.
If you go to the Reunion Preferences and select Privacy & Sensitivity a window opens then select > Privacy > Who is Private > check people with no death date born after; (select your year of choice )- should then make private those you are referring to.

Thank you, Alan. Yes, I have already done your suggestion above and I understand that this makes Private those for whom a birth date of some sort IS known. My dilemma is how to create a logical sort that makes private those who hypothetically could still be living even if I don't know yet a birth date or year.

For example, I know for a fact that a distant cousin by marriage named Sam is still living, but I don't yet have a birth date for him. I seek a way to turn relatives like him (there are many) to Private so that their resulting listing in my Web Project Report is just: Living, Male/Female.

The challenge also is how to NOT eliminate relatives from long ago (1800's) for whom I have neither a birth nor a death date, and who clearly could NOT still be living. And I have many of these relatives, as well.

Indeed, there is always more research and data gathering to be done, even if it means estimating birth years. In the meantime, I'd rather play it safe when publishing on the internet.

I apologize if I'm not being clear enough, however, I look forward to perhaps some further ideas?!

[baddorfdeb]

What the guy before you was saying is: all those people who, as you said "clearly could NOT still be living" should get a question mark in the death column. Then you can set privacy settings to show nobody who is dead. (I haven't looked at those settings, so my terminology is probably wrong).

[susanassmus]

You can set a flag for "possibly living." Then under privacy settings you can check "People with this flag checked" and choose "Possibly Liiving" in the drop down menu.

[poised_one]

I want to thank everyone above for their responses. It took me a few days to wrap my brain around it all, but I've finally understood what you all were indicating with your suggestions. I had about 1500 people to go through manually. Here's what I did:

1. created a new flag called "Possibly Living"
2. on the Find tab, I searched everyone with:
-birth date is "blank"
and
-death date is "blank"
and
-Flag: Possibly Living checked "No"
and
-Last Name field begins with "A"

3. then I went person by person to double-check if they are clearly not living or could be living
4. those who could be living I MARKED them
5. OR if they clearly couldn't be living, I entered a "?" in the death field
6. I did this with every letter of the alphabet . . .
7. After each letter of the alphabet was "done", I did the same search again and usually found a few I'd missed.
8. Then I triple checked with one last full search without the Last Name field begins criteria.
9. I cleaned up the last of the strays (I hope!)
10. Then, in Preferences> Privacy I checked the flag option for Possibly Living to make those folks private.
11. I've run the new Web Report and re-uploaded it to our website.

Thanks again for your help!

David

[poised_one]

I neglected to mention the crucial step of taking those I'd marked and changing them to have the flag: Possibly Living...

[shilohreader]

I came here to ask the exact same question. Thank you so much for the detailed instructions!