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?
Ok this might cause more problems/confusions than it solves but 1748/1749 ISN’T an inexact date. The people who said that their son was born in 1748 are right and when we say he was born in 1749 we are right also.
In the old calender that was used way back when (Not sure of the exact date right now) March 25, 1748 was the first day of the year. At some point someone decided that that was just silly and decided that January 1, 1748 was the first day of the year.
So although he was born in Feb 1748 THEN Feb is considered to be 1749 NOW because he was born before March 25th but after Jan 1st.
So for some number of years the first 3 months of the calender year are “double dated” by modern genealogists to explain this “inaccuracy” between the old records and the new updated family histories.
So if you use one date people are gonna ask questions about the difference between the record and your data, if you use it the other way your going to get lectures about how he was ACTUALLY born a year after.
Pick your poison folks either way your gonna get someone somewhere telling you why your wrong.
Fay
Comment by Fay X — August 5, 2009 @ 11:44 am
My thoughts -
If someone is searching a particular year and you have written “1824/1825″ and they are looking for all births in 1824, won’t that profile pop up since it has that year in it? Additionally, I like the idea of narrowing it down to two years as opposed to seeing an entire decade (1820’s). I prefer to be as close to the truth as possible in the event that I’m able to find a lead on more information, it’s easier to research two years than it is to research 10 years.
Same thing with the “aft., abt.” thing. Simpler to search out a correct date if you are certain you’re looking AFTER a certain date or BEFORE a certain date. How about radio buttons with the words “Before” “After” and “Hell if I know” next to the fields? Perhaps have the text show up in red so you’ll know you need to research more or that it isn’t showing a for sure date. Red highlighting stands out more than what we currently have (Certain, uncertain, etc)and that works well for you (wish I had italics now) COLLABORATIVE types. Perhaps one of your “Trusted” folks would see red text and find the correct information. Me, I’ve learned not to leave relatives alone with the power to change things.
And Fay? I adore your twisted mind. The Gregorian Calendar was adopted in 1584. Before that it was the Julian Calandar. I know the Orthodox follow some other calendar and it might even be the Julian, and on average, they lag behind about 11 days, although many of them have adopted January 1 as their New Year. Some countries adopted the Gregorian later than others. It’s Christmas that was March 25 and may have been changed to mask a Pagan holiday in December. Please don’t take this as criticism, I wrote it all with a friendly smile! And if anyone tells you your dates are wrong, you can use one of my favorite lines in response “Hey! Go pound salt”.
Comment by 2MuchFamilyNotEnufTime — August 5, 2009 @ 8:08 pm
Chris,
Can we make another “Save Changes” button, maybe somewhere near the top of the page or before the Bio section? I often don’t have much to add to the bio section and dislike having to scroll to the bottom of the page. I mean, there’s no reason we can’t have two “Save Changes”, right?
Comment by 2MuchFamilyNotEnufTime — August 5, 2009 @ 9:26 pm
LOL at least you recognize a twisted mind when you see one. Once upon a time I got curious about the double dates and did a search “double dating” + genealogy. I don’t know anything about christmas being on Mar 25th but theres a bunch of stuff about england being stubborn and not wanting to have the first of the year on Jan 1st.
Now if you are trying to tell me that the interntet could be WRONG, I’ll just go bury my head in the sand for awhile.
I’ve been known to be wrong on many seperate occasions and am never offended by being called out. But at least this time I have company.
Gotta go google, go pound salt brb.
Fay
Comment by Fay X — August 6, 2009 @ 2:26 am