I’ve been entering some facts, that are not confined to a specific point in time, with a sort date very much into the future. For example, facts like character description, congenital medical conditions, interests etc. The sort dates start at the year 3000 as I wanted these to all appear at the bottom of the Edit Person screen, and I wanted to future proof my genealogy.
However I’ve now heard, (and I’m not sure if it’s true), that some programs do not bring across any facts that fall after a persons death. This doesn’t seem as if it could be right as it would then preclude any probate facts for instance.
But I’m wondering if other people have heard of this occurring?
I’ve also got one fact with a sort date of 1!
Are there any other pitfalls that we should be aware of with the use of very future or past sort dates?
I’ve not heard that a Sort Date has any bearing on what other software imports. It is not a standard tag in GEDCOM so either the importing software will not import it or will recognize it for what it is and import to its equivalent. You may get warnings or error messages to review.
Thanks for your response Tom and providing some “under the hood” info – that the sort dates are not a standard tag in the Gedcom. I really appreciate all your help and observations on this forum
Since posting, I’ve downloaded a free genealogy program and then imported the RM data.
The facts that have these very future sort dates did port across, but were not placed in the sort date sequence. They were mostly placed within the persons timeline during their lifespan. The description and reference no. events were placed into a category called attributes (although I can’t seem to access the notes for them).
The probate facts that I have that are dated quite some time after death (12 years in one case), also ported across and were in sequence.
Just one small test using one other program and although the sort dates were ignored it ported across most of the actual data, which is great! I’m not planning on moving away from RM, but it’s provided food for thought and I’ll have a think about the use of sort dates moving forward (and try and find out why the description notes didn’t seem to port across). I might also try and import into other programs to see how the sort dates and notes behave there too.
Terry – I’m sorry that my post wasn’t as explicit as perhaps it should have been. When I heard about this issue with sort dates, the person told me that some software has a “normal time range” for post death facts (which I should have mentioned in the initial post!). She wasn’t sure what this range was. Burial / cremation, I was assuming would be captured within this “normal time range” and that’s why I didn’t mention these facts. I’m glad you did as it’s allowed this further explanation and maybe somebody knows more about this “normal time range”! But I was wondering about my very post-dated probate events ………………and everything sort dated (but not dated) with the year 3000 plus.
