Birth dates not showing in pedigree, family or descendants views

For some persons (not all) who are marked as ‘living’ and have a birth date set, do not show the birth data in either pedigree, family or descendant views. Unchecking ‘living’ still does not allow the birth data to show in the pedigree, descendant or family views. What do I need to do?

Run the database tool Rebuild Indexes. If any still show no birth year, then they likely have a birth event with no date or a text date instead of a valid date and, if there are two birth events, the undated one is set to Primary.

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in addition to what Tom said – if you date is not a true date value that might cause issues (extra spaces for example)

Also check on the Fact Type List under List on the People page that you only have one birth fact. If you do, before you delete the custom one let us know and we will tell you how to switch them over.

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Screenshot of someone who it isn’t working for might help :slight_smile:

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This problem is related to multiple ‘fact’ templates being present. I find that I have multiple templates for the following ‘facts’:

Birth - qty 2, Burial - qty 2, Death - qty 2, Marriage - qty 3, Marriage Notes - qty 2, Property - qty 2

I found that I can solve the original ‘Birth’ problem by deleting an individual’s birth fact and selection the other birth fact template and re-entering the data. I then tried to delete the problem template on the ‘Fact Types’ selection pop-up box. But, I cannot select it as the Delete button does not change color when I hover the mouse over it. (What does this mean?) Trying to delete the other birth fact does let me select it for deletion, but the system gives me a warning that ‘This fact type is being used by one or more individuals in the database and removing it will delete the fact from all individuals’. So, I aborted this approach.

In the past, I have created new fact types, mostly related to Census’s. I don’t remember adding any of these existing multiple fact types. I suspect these may have been system created by past genealogy programs through GEDCOM export and imports??

I hope that getting rid of the fact duplicates won’t be too painful. Thanks for your help.

Scott W.

Yes these other facts were probably imported from other genealogy programs

Some of these—Birth - qty 2, Burial - qty 2, Death - qty 2, Marriage qty 3 - can easily be fixed IF you are using RM 10 or RM 11

First BACKUP YOUR DATABASE!!!

Then go into Fact Types ( located under lists in RM 11) and look at the 2 birth facts-- one ( the one you couldn’t delete as button was grayed out) will have a fact sentence something similar to this
[Person] born < [Date]>< | [Place]> <[Place Details]>
one of the 2 PROBABLY has NEED TO DEFINE SENTENCE
On the one that says need to define sentence ( or doesn’t have a grayed out button) CHANGE the name of the fact to BIRTH 2 then hit okay-- I actually think that I would go ahead at this point and define the sentence ( just use the one from the other birth fact plus check mark description if you don’t know what original said)-- By doing this whatever was under that fact in the original file will now be visible in this file…

Then go to PUBLISH and Run the Fact List Report for BIRTH 2–

it will give you a list of people— take a screen shot of that so you can check it later
image
Then go to TOOLS on the left hand side-- click ON CHANGE FACT TYPE FOR EVEYONE under FACT Tools
Under Change Events of this Type— Select BIRTH 2
To this This Type---- Birth
Run Selected TOOL

note when you run the selected tool, it looks like nothing happened BUT it did, you should now be able to go back and check some of the people from that list – if okay then delete Birth 2–if it still says it’s being used by someone, run it again..

Then repeat for Death , Burial and Marriage-- remember to do Marriage 2 and Marriage 3 separately into Marriage

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The guide from @nkess is excellent. Here are a couple of supplementary points:

  1. The built-in, unremovable Marriage fact type is a ‘family-type’, not an ‘individual-type’. Early in Ancestry TreeShare I was surprised to find that my database had inherited an ‘individual-type’ Marriage fact type. It cannot be converted to a ‘family-type’ fact type. If you have any of those, you will have to address them in the Edit Person screen for each instance. Maybe they are redundant and can be deleted or they have key info that you will need to copy over into the existing or new Marriage event.
  2. Marriage Notes is definitely a custom fact type and you will have to inspect whether they are individual or family and what they have. Likely, you will want to copy their unique content into a standard Marriage event. You may want to explore how both ways are handled in narrative reports if those are important to you.
  3. Property is likely only a custom fact type, iirc. If so, pick one as Primary and convert the other to it as Nancy described

Thanks @Tom for reminding me that Marriage is a family-type— if your Marriages are family - type ( and NOT individual as Tom said), you can use Change Fact for every person BUT it does it differently-- it make a second marriage fact
Before

After


Notice that after the change, it doesn’t list the witnesses because I didn’t check mark desc and add [desc] to the original-- do that and it will appear again

definitely want to do a fact report before hand and save a screen shot, so you can fix

I doubt that RM carries any witnesses over from one fact type to another but I have not tested it. Even if it does, the sentence template may not be set appropriately to include them.

And if, for a person, a fact exists of the same type as that to which you want to change another, then, of course, there will be a multiple of the same type.