Let's have a challenge to get birth dates added

Question

What if we had a challenge to encourage people to roughly approximate missing birth years for profiles for which they are the manager?

To keep it simple, we could encourage people to add ~ 10 date guesses a day.  They could easily find the profiles missing dates by looking in their watchlists and sorting on the birthdate field.

We could provide some quick guide to estimating birthdates based on dates of siblings, children, parents, etc.

It might present a challenge for people with profiles pre-1700, but we could point people to the Pre-1700 Certification Quiz to aid those people.

It would be a start, at least. 

How would we go about making this a good, fun challenge for people?

Comments

I'm not sure if everyone knows about the DateGuess template, but I'd like to suggest that if anyone is going to particpate in this challenge, they put this template on profiles they're updating. It really helps to draw attention to the fact that dates on the profile are estimated.

I also usually put a statement in the bio that says how I estimated the date -- e.g., "Her birthdate is estimated and is based on her spouse's birthdate."

To use the template, enter this at the top of the biography box:

{{DateGuess | type of date}} (type of date can be birth, marriage, death)

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Am I the only person who remembers the old WFT estimated dates and what a nightmare they turned out to be for many people trying to do their family history?  I still find them cited on many Ancestry trees and find that when I see that a lot in a tree, I tend to disregard anything else in the tree.

I have entire lines where it was not unusual for several generations to find a man marrying a woman 20 to 30 years his junior and estimated dates often throw folks - even with a tag or template attached to them.  Once I got over the preconceived notion that folks were usually of the same generation when they married, I found it much easier to find them in various documents.

Having said that - I have a lot of "About" dates in mine, usually based on census or some other nebulous record. I sigh a lot over those.

Just my two cents.

Answer 1

Great idea for a challenge ! Also if one put in birth dates in their own watchlists, it will prompt more activities in the ANNIVERSARIES stream in your My WikiTree menu.

Answer 2

I love the idea of a challenge as a way to get some dates into profiles that don't have any, but ....

I don't have any better idea to offer, but the way you've laid it out would be a nightmare for me.  I adopted about 1,200 profiles that were in a single abandoned gedcom and most of them don't have dates.  I have been working my little (?) tail off for about 5 months now trying to find information sources and write profiles for them - of course, with dates!  The ones I have not yet gotten to - around half of them - have no reasonable way of estimating dates because siblings, parents, children, spouses, - maybe even the family dog - don't have any dates either.  In most cases, these were German Jews, for whom very few records exist.  The only records that might exist for a small number of them are those in local churches, some of whom recorded Jewish births in their communities but you would have to know the local birth place and then physically go to the churches in the area to examine their records to see if they have a separate section for Jewish births and - if that is the case then - if it's your lucky day - maybe you'll find your person's birth record there.

If anyone has any ideas for how to either find or estimate birth dates for these profiles, by all means feel free to do so - I will be ever so grateful to you!  I have put them in their own maintenance category at http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Loewenstein_Descent.ged_2011-09-18  

Comments

Gaile - that certainly IS a challenge you have with those profiles!

Hopefully your experience will be an exception rather than the rule; I know I've seen quite a few profiles with no dates for anyone either, but the count is nowhere near the staggering number you have.

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Gaile,

I looked at the first profile in your maintenance catagory and for that one I would estimate a date of 1797 for her birth.  My logic is that she probably married at about the age of 20, plus of minus a couple of years and she married in 1817 so that would be about 1797.

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Gaile --

I would be willing to help you with your list. I went through the exercise of updating all of my profiles with birthdates a while ago, so I have nothing to add to this challenge.

I just took a look at one of your profiles, and I see that you have birth notes, etc in the bio (Eugene Davis). In this instance, would you like to use that information for a birthdate and then mark it as "uncertain?" Will there be other profiles with these same circumstances?