Genealogy Chat

Hi everyone, I have only been a member for six months, but have been researching for over 10 years. One of my frustrations is that prior to 1837, only baptism and burials records exist for our ancestors. When we upload our trees to Genes, it only looks at birth and death entries. It does show baptism information on the extended data, but not for burials. Also the date of a baptism is not used for searches for matches. This is frustating in trying to find a match for a person. I have requested that Genes changes thier format to include a birth OR baptism date and a death OR burial date. I cannot be the only one who is frustrated by this. Regards June

Birth year and birthplace should be sufficient info for deciding whether you have a potential 'match'.......and it's easy enough to make contact to check. To extend the range of info to include every little detail would require a huge alteration to the site, and probably result in vastly increased subscription charges. Reg

At the moment, I fill in the birth date box with the year of the baptism (unless there is any more detailed info on the approx year, eg baptised age 10), and tick the approx box. I also do this if the only info I have comes from census, where the age is often one year wrong anyway, and sometimes considerably more. I search for matches for two, five or ten years either side of the supposed birth date, depending on how common the name is. Any uploading I do is from an FTM tree - here there are often several alternative dates of birth from the census and baptism sources - I have noticed that I need to be careful about which is the preferred source of the DoB.

I have contacted to powers that be and have made my suggestion, it really would not take much to change things. Just a couple of extra boxes on the database. As I have over 16000 on my tree, I really do not want to go back and have to put in the baptism year and burial year in the births and deaths. They seem interested in my request, so I will post any answer I receive here. June

I agree with you June. My tree, built over nearly 20 years includes hundreds of pre 1837 events which GR doesn't pick up from an uploaded Gedcom. Also my tree program, like many others allows dates to be recorded as 'between -- and --' 'before ...' or 'before...' and GR either does not pick these up or garbles them. GR's present dating facility still seems to be rooted in the premise that everyone will build their tree, one individual at a time, on the site and surely needs to be updated to recognise that a large number of members are using family tree software and uploading Gedcom. Its a while since I sent this suggestion to GR - perhaps now is a good time to try again.