How do you handle inexact dates?
Fay and Joanna brought up a bunch of issues in their comments to my “Upload pdf files as images” post. I don’t have good answers to some of them and decided I should try talking them out with you.
Here’s one that I puzzle over. Joanna wrote, “I’ve come across bunches of people with birthdays like this (August 4, 1824/1825) and guess what? Yep, I gotta pick ONE year because WikiTree doesn’t let me put both years in. Sometimes I find ‘born aft. 1692′ and can’t add that either. GIVE ME SOME LEEWAY, CHRIS! You’re so inflexible with history.”
One thing WikiTree does have, that I haven’t seen on any other family tree tools, is a “certainty status” radio button by each field. That is, you can mark a date as certain, uncertain, or intentionally blank. This way if you’re not sure if a birth date was, say, 1824 or 1825, you can choose one and mark the field as uncertain.
Another thing you can do is use the free wiki space section to explain this in more detail. For example, you might write, “The birth date is marked as 1824 but it could also be 1825. It’s based on the self-reported age of 66 in the 1890 census …” or whatever.
All fine and good, you say, but how come the date field doesn’t just allow text like “1824/1825″?
My reasoning: real dates, even guesses, make automatic matching easier. Text fields vary so much (”about”, “abt.”, “circa”, “ca.”, “around”, etc.) that they’re tough to match.
In another post Fay and I talked about how to know whether one John Denman is the same as another John Denman. Birth and death dates, of course, are an important part of this. Our system will be able to compare “1825″ with other dates, but a text field that says “1824/1825″ or “abt. 1825″ won’t be interpreted.
We’ll also be working on other ways to use dates. You might want a timeline for your family. Or maybe you’d want to call up a list of all your family members who were born in the 1820s. Who knows. Having real dates will make all this easier.
That said, our system isn’t perfect. Handling of dates can and will be improved, I’m just not sure how yet.
In addition to the “about” and “after” type dates that Fay mentioned, I’d like WikiTree to be able to handle decades. You should be able to say someone was born in the 1820s if that’s all you know. Forcing you to choose a date like 1825 when you really have no idea of the exact year is far less than ideal.
Anybody have suggestions? Have you seen other tools that do this sort of thing especially well?