@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
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.