Birth/Christen and death/Burial dates in Index and Family View

[dennis]

This was raised in October 2021 and here we are 5 years later and whilst the issue raised then has been largely fixed the feature needs to be completed.

Where a Birth date is not entered the Christen date, if present, will display in lieu in the family view, however a Baptism date will not.

Similarly, when a Death date is not entered the Burial date if present, will display in the family view in lieu.

However, the insertion of the Christen date or Burial date in lieu does not extend to the Index pane which impedes the ability to select from records with similar or the same names where no Birth or Death dates are known. This is a major issue with English vital records pre-1837 where Baptism and Burial dates are used, although periodically a Birth date will be recorded.

Please can a modification be made to the Family View and Index to extend displaying the Christen Date in lieu of a Birth date to show a Baptism date when no Christen date and the Burial date in lieu of a Death Date. I would also be nice to have similar applied to the Basic Search.

I’m undertaking a one-name study and the searching for records is killing me in terms of time spent continually having to conduct Advanced Searches.

[thejerrybryan]

I’m very much in support of your request. I would only emphasize your point that the Christen date will serve in part as a surrogate for a Birth date whereas a Baptism date will not. This has been much discussed before in RM’s forums, and the discussion often turns quickly into a religious debate about the meaning of the words “baptism” and “christening” and about which meanings are correct. Feelings typically run strong.

Without even discussing my own religious opinions on this issue, I would only point out that I think that genealogy software itself should be agnostic and neutral on the subject. Namely, genealogy software should support both the Christen fact and the Baptism fact as surrogates for birth dates. That’s because there are different mainstream religious traditions on this issue, and any genealogy software will have users from both traditions. And even despite any particular user’s religious views on this subject, they are likely to have sources from both traditions.

From a pure genealogy point of view, I think it’s better not to depend on the Christen fact or the Birth fact to be a surrogate for the Birth fact. Rather, I think it’s better to enter either a Birth fact + Christen fact or a Birth fact + Baptism fact, with the christening or baptism record becoming the source for the Birth fact in addition to being the source for its own fact. A note on the Birth fact should even include the information that the birthdate is being estimated from the christening record or from the baptism record. Doing it that way makes all the other arguments go away.

[dennis]

I may not have been clear. In lieu of a missing Birth Date, either the Christen Date OR Baptism Date should be used, if either exists.

I never estimate birth dates because there is is too much room for error. I have found many English Baptism registers where the Baptism/Christening is up to 8 years after the Birth according to the register, and I have found an instance where a baptism was performed the week prior to a marriage.

[TomH]

Given an 8-year gap between the actual birth and the baptism/christening, why would you reject an estimated date for a Birth event but want the Year of the Baptism or Christening event as a surrogate Birth Year?

RootsMagic supports a variety of date modifiers and formats. You can enter directional modifiers, such as before, after, since, until or by, or qualitative modifiers, such as say, circa, about, estimated, calculated, possibly or likely, or combinations of the two (like “before possibly 23 Feb 1867”.)

Source: Adding facts

Add the Birth fact and enter a year with whatever modifier you think suits. Then you won’t have to wait another 5 years to, possibly, see your enhancement request fulfilled.

Now that may seem like a lot of work but you get to make the call on what date you choose to use for each person. I did a SQL script back in the RM7 era that does it for lots of people in seconds which I’ve just updated for RM11:

Births – Add from Christening or Baptism #birth #events – SQLite Tools for...

[dennis]

Tom, I don’t want to use the Christen/Baptism date as a surrogate Birth date, just for the Christen/Baptism date to appear in the Family view and Index pane where a Birth date does not exist and the Burial date to display where a Death date is absent.

For pre 1837 UK and pre 1856 Australian records birth dates and death dates are found wanting due to churches only being interested in baptisms and burials.
When you looking at an Index with 50 or more people with the same name any visual help is welcome.

[TomH]

@dennis

I don’t want to use the Christen/Baptism date as a surrogate Birth date, just for the Christen/Baptism date to appear in the Family view and Index pane where a Birth date does not exist

Wow! That took me by surprise. Why wouldn’t you when having a Birth date, however approximate, accomplishes not only the BirthYear display request but supports a whole other set of features that BirthYear alone does not? For example, first sentence for a person in Narrative reports, Search, Sort, WebSearch?, …

[Deezzaa]

Unless I have misunderstood, I am personally against this. I have a lot of instances where the baptism/christening records are many years after the birth (sometimes even just before they got married), also I have examples of many siblings being baptised/christened on the same day - a sort of “job lot”. If I don’t have the birth date, I just put “circa (the year of baptism)” instead. This date is then used automatically in any reports.

[TomH]

@Deezzaa it’s ambiguous to me what you oppose because your reply was to my last message, not to the original post by @dennis in this discussion in which there is not a consensus and, so far, considerable room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. I’m going to attempt to clarify the current status of RM11.5 in its support of surrogate Birth and Death dates when there is no Birth or Fact event. I’ll use the example of Jack Spratt having Christen and Burial records as I believe they are the only ones used as surrogates and his wife Jill Hill having Birth and Death records.

People View

Sidebar of People view shows that the Born/Died columns of Index do not use Christen/Burial events as surrogates.

Edit Person uses both Birth/Death …

…and Christen/Burial for Life Span

Family View also supports both. However, changing the Christen to Baptism for Jack replaces the ch: ChristenDate with an empty “b:” (Birth). And the “c: 1 Jul 2000” disappears from the sidebar person summary:

Descendants view behaves similarly to the Life Span in the Edit Person heading by adding Born and Died columns to show the Birth/Death event dates or those of the surrogates:It would be nice if RM was consistent in using ch: to designate Christening but note the bigger discrepancy between the Born/Died columns here and those in the Sidebar Index.

The AI Prompt Builder also supports surrogates in its Life Span content:

Surrogates for Birth/Death dates are supported seemingly only in redesign of some of the user interface and in the body of some reports but not in:

RootsMagic Explorer

Index of Names for Reports

I have tested all reports with a Name Index and found that omission of surrogates in the Index is universally true.

WebSearch is bivalent:

The list at the bottom has Born/Died columns with surrogates but only Jill’s Birth/Death years are auto-filled in the form itself when selected.

Reports are a mixed bag apart from their Index of Names which does not support surrogates. Surname Statistics does use surrogates for Earliest and Most Recent dates but Statistics does not for age calculations. Relationship, Ancestor, Descendant, Hourglass and Fan Charts and Descendant List do not display surrogates but Box Chart does. Individual List does not for Age.

I’m going to post this now and come back to it later with an explanation of what I think is happening under the hood.

[bossgen]

I’d like to point out, and no one seems to mention, that there are other religions and we also do genealogy. For Jews, male children have a bris (circumcision) 7 days after birth, and while females do not have a bris, they often have a naming ceremony, or are named in the temple. I have custom facts for this and try to remove christening/baptism where ever I can. Although, in the modern era, it is generally done in the hospital unless you request it not to be done. None of my brothers were done in the hospital - all 3 were done in the home (I was old enough to remember them).

[TomH]

Good point. Do you have cases where you do not know the Birth Date but do know one of these near-birth dates? If so, do you add a Birth event with an estimated date? Without it and, currently, without a Christen Date, RM cannot do any Age calculation so I imagine you would.

Moreover, I imagine that, if I were working on a large database with lots of those cases and a variety of near-Birth events to draw from as a reference, I would want a Tool with which I could batch generate Birth Events for those with none from selected near-Birth events with controls for how much the date offset should be, whether Place (or part thereof such as State/Prov level) and Place Detail (if still applicable) should be copied, whether the Note should be copied and what string, if any, should be appended to it or replace it, whether Citation(s) should be copied, … Doing so exploits the full capabilities of RootsMagic’s displays and reports, many of which are handicapped by the lack of surrogates for Birth and Death event Dates.

Surrogate Date processing in RM is captive and discriminatory as you have pointed out and only partially implemented. Adding standard Birth and Death events based on the best information available from near-Birth, near-Death facts of any type (standard or custom) provides universally recognised book-ends fully supported by all RM outputs (screen, reports, export). That’s where I would want developer time spent rather than on extending Surrogate Date processing to Baptism.

[bossgen]

I actually only have the actual bris records of my brothers, so no, I don’t have cases where I have a bris date and no birth date. And I have no naming records except for one of my nieces.

[TomH]

@dennis

the insertion of the Christen date or Burial date in lieu does not extend to the Index pane which impedes the ability to select from records with similar or the same names where no Birth or Death dates are known

Having shown in my earlier reply the inconsistencies across RM11.5 user interface and outputs in its support of the Christen/Burial events as surrogate dates for Birth/Death dates, now I’ll describe what I think is going on under the hood.

1. There is more than one data point available:
   1. There is the Date of the Birth|Christen|Death|Burial Event itself in the record for it in the database’s EventTable, one row per name.
   2. There is a register for each of BirthYear and DeathYear for each Name row in the NameTable which is updated when the corresponding event Date is added, updated, or there’s been a switch in which one of multiple such events is Set Primary. Just the yyyy part of the event Date is copied over. This is a legacy from older, slower technology of decades ago to support rapid display of, for example, the sidebar Index. Sometimes the BirthYear or DeathYear would get out of sync with the primary Birth|Death event and a database-wide update of them was added into the Rebuild Indexes Database Tool. Users, myself included, advocated for live queries of the EventTable rather than relying on intermediary registers. I think we have seen some progress on that front as I have noted that Report Indexes of Names where Birth or Birth-Death years are included are now live whereas, iirc, they drew from the possibly out-of-sync NameTable in RM7.
2. RM11.5 draws from one or the other table for Birth|Death, Born|Died, Life Span using surrogate Christen|Burial in some cases, depending on the screen or report output. If a full date is shown, it is from the EventTable. If yyyy is all that is shown, it could be from the EventTable Date or from the NameTable registers. If cyyyy or chyyyy or buyyyy is shown, that output field for all persons is populated from the EventTable, not from an intermediate register in NameTable.

Advanced users of RM have advocated for decades that adding Birth and Death events with the best Dates one can guesstimate resolves many issues and enables all of RM’s capabilities whereas programmed surrogates are but a partial answer and cannot support all religious traditions.

I agree that, as in your case of a one-name study, large populations imported without a Birth event become logistically impossible to add Birth|Death events manually. That’s why I advocate for a tool to be added to RM to add them in globally or in batches (select from list or a selected group), based on selected fact type(s) for reference, user-specified date offset and/or date modifier added to the reference’s date. “RootsMagic supports a variety of date modifiers and formats. You can enter directional modifiers, such as before, after, since, until or by, or qualitative modifiers, such as say, circa, about, estimated, calculated, possibly or likely, or combinations of the two (like “before possibly 23 Feb 1867”.)” From the RM11 User Guide. Other considerations would be what part of Place, Place Details should be copied from the ref; likewise for Note, Citations. I exampled a basic outboard tool for RM7 nine years ago and one for RM11 this week.

Birth and Death data are the bookends of a person’s vital data and story and are supported universally by all genealogy and family history software and services. It makes sense to focus one’s development energy on them first rather than piece-meal implementation of surrogates that are confined to the application.