While much if this cannot be passed via GEDCOM I would like to suggest three new flags:
On a person have a flag for a twin and ideally a dropdown to select that twin.
On a fact with a dubious source such as Place have an option for questionable so you’re not tempted to put a ? in the name.
On a person where you’ve done all you can and you no longer want hints searched for or displayed have a “Done” flag. (Family Tree Builder already has this)
I created a Fact called “Status” and enter DONE in the Desc field (Status only has Date & Desc fields).
I use the the convention:
place name [probably]
for example-
United States [probably]
New York, United States [probably]
If I ever devise a belter system, I’ll do a find and replace or analogous.
These place names are accepted by FamilySearch FamilyTree and Ancestry.
If I use a place like this, it is assumed that I have no hard evidence for it, so I won’t add a citation.
I use this mainly to divide up the people in my tree by country of birth- USA, Germany, Egypt etc. It is also useful for a research aid when I want to work on a certain subset of people.
This is analogous to my use of “say dates” . If I am making an educated guess, without hard evidence, I’ll enter it as:
say 1922
It’s one of the supported date qualifiers in RM and used in other apps (TMG & ?) OK in FSFT, but not supported by Ancestry.
Again, no citation .
If I change my mind about their use, I’ll delete all of the say dates.
I add “twin of xxxx” in the birth description field, its searchable.
With questionable or unknown places I prefix it with “of” as in “of, New York, United States”. Any place location starting with “of” is an estimated place.
I also started a WebHint fact where I could note the status. You can color code based on that information. I think it would be really hard to ever say you are done with hints on a person. The white/blueish bulb is an indication if you are done or not. New hints do come up all the time. What you’re probably saying is you are done researching. To me that would be worthy of a color-code as a visual clue.
Interesting. I’ve seen things like “probably North Carolina” or “North Carolina ?” and for sure those hose up the searches on pretty much everything. Not tried changing them to North Carolina, United States [probably]. None of these I’m dealing with have a real citation as they’re coming from cousins or other secondary sources and the reason I’m cleaning up the place names it to search for birth / death / marriages records to use as citations.