I’m totally new to all this - is there a way to change the two years that show to the right of my index of people from Born and Died to Christened and Buried? Because most of my people are born in England, I don’t have birth and death dates which leaves the two spaces for “Born” and “Died” next to them blank. When I am trying to find one of 20 people with the same name, for instance, I can’t find the one I want by just looking at dates that aren’t there in the index, but have to click on each one instead. Help!
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I don’t see a way to change which columns of data are shown. But I definitely support this as a Feature request @rzamor1.
PS … Welcome!!!
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I also don’t see a way to change the columns BUT you can do several things-- as for buried, you could put died ABT or Before Oct 18, 1782–when it comes to Baptisms and Christenings-- that’s a whole different story as the kids could have been 6 months or 9 yrs old ( sometimes I have found birth dates in the Baptismal records in Findmypast)…
Any time I have a question abt an ancestor’s age and there is no birth record, I typically try to find them in every census I can and compare the results— I have found that sometimes it is more accurate if you can find the very 1st Census they are in and go with that year as I’ve had some that said they were born 1859-- but never showed up in the census until 1870 at the age of 8…
Thank you for responding—I could sure appreciate this feature . . .
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. I totally agree with you as I have found some records that say they were “X_ years old when christened. I too love it when I am dealing with the time period of census records for all the help I get there, but I have around 10,000 in my database and so many of them are born in the 15, 16 and 1700’s before census records. To go back and give them all a “born about” date would take so very, very, very long . . .
I’ve thought of another technique you could use, adding information incrementally as you access person records …
If you don’t use a particular field, such as ‘Suffix’, you could add their birth year to that field. In the case of Suffix, it will be automatically added to in the index name column.
Another path would be to create an alternative name for them that included their birth year, and enable alternate name display.
Neither option is particularly elegant, or easy to do in bulk. But at least it would give you some relief, over time, from always having to open each person.
Adding information to the suffix field is not really a good idea. It does have impacts as to the hinting system. It is also a very bad idea to put bogus data into the database.
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@kfunk … Which is why I said …
Short of having the ability to reveal the actual columns they need, their only options are to continue to suffer with their difficulty or juryrig a less-than-optimal workaround. Yes, it will have an impact on RM’s behavior, so they have to decide which is the lesser of two evils.
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Why not use the People List view with two additional custom items of Christen Date and Burial Date? It works similar to the index in that you can find people, and then view/edit that person, spouse, and children from that view. See the attached view.
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If you have an age for the date of death or burial would putting in an estimated birth date work, you can always say in ‘Notes’ where you got this birth date from? If you take death information from the GRO web site or the Burial from FreeREG that gives the age of death, but, remember the person who gave the Registrar the information may not have known the exact date of birth so that could have also been an estimate!
I wonder if this would solve my problem—if I can figure out how to get my screen to look like yours. How would I add those custom columns of Christen Date and Burial Date? . . .I would really like to try this. Thank you.
I appreciate everyone’s ideas and help.
Here’s an animation to show you how:
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Wow!! Just Wow! I have no idea how you did that, but even I, as challenged as I am technologically, could follow your animation. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
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You’re very welcome.
As for how I did it, I use a screen-capturing app called ShareX. It can capture images or record the screen (or specific windows).
If you want to learn how, I created a ‘tip’ posting here:
Thank you so much, Kimberly! I just followed your animation and was able to get that screen customized just the way I wanted it. That will really help.
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Thank you again for the idea of a way to handle this issue that was driving me nuts!
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