Twins
I would like to be able to enter a set of twins into Family Tree in the correct order of their birth, but they only get listed in the incorrect order because the second twin's name is closer to the beginning of the alphabet.
Comments
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Carolyn,
I am just another lowly User/Patron. Great suggested enhancement. You are not alone. Many of us have experienced that same. This has been a much requested and suggested enhancement in the various 'iterations' of this Feedback Forums in FamilySearch over many years. Unfortunately, to date such has not been implemented in Family Tree of FamilySearch. We can only hope that such has been considered by FamilySearch and hopefully, may be somewhere on the ever-growing List of things to be done. Please be aware that there is an ever-growing List of priorities of things to be actioned in Family Tree and the OTHER Parts of FamilySearch and that there is a Limited amount of Resources eg. Funds available to FamilySearch. FamilySearch is NOT a Commercial Website. It really is a matter of just hoping and waiting. Again, great suggested enhancement. We can live in hope. I know that this does not help, but I hope that this gives you some insight and perspective.
Brett
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Speaking as a twin: why does it matter to you? (Granted, our parents managed to name us in alphabetical order: J is three minutes older than M.)
That said, I would not be averse to being able to re-order siblings. Sometimes, I know the birth order but nothing about the actual birthdates. It would be nice to be able to capture that information in Family Tree in a simple, intuitive way (rather than needing to write a novel and then needing to decide where to put it).
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Julia, Carolyn wants to have the correct birth order. That's not hard to understand.
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This suggestion has been placed on this, and its "predecessor" forum, for many, many years. It is FamilySearch, not Julia ("I would not be averse to being able to re-order siblings"), who does not seem to think this issue should be given any kind of priority.
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I would also like to know Carolyn's reason. Perhaps it would help to make a case for adding this feature.
Julia offered a great reason! I too have been frustrated working with families whose children have well documented birth order but no dates.
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I, personally, wouldn't place much import on the order of entry but I would respect Carolyn's wish for it to be so. Perhaps at some future date...
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I have two lines that have the twins out of order. I would like to use the pedigree in a family project and want to document the birth order correctly. I will be adding an A or B to their name if Family Search doesn't have a better way to re-order them.
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I tested in beta.familysearch.org with adding a time of birth to the birth date line - it had no effect on the order of birth for the 'twin'. It would be great if the time of birth was known for each that it could resolve this situation.
I do not know if there is another way currently to reorder 'twins' unless one was born the day/evening before the other (which should order them accordingly). But for twins born the same day I don't know any other way than for FamilySearch development to allow time entered to order them - or perhaps allowing order to be edited for twins. Entering a time on a date is not standardized in FamilySearch Family Tree and I do not know if there are plans to allow such - until such options I guess you will need to make Notes about the birth order.
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Why not expand this request to its logical end, which is: Any date field should be able to support information down to the minute level, if an editor enters it.
It shouldn't affect entries that don't have this information, and wouldn't necessary have to be displayed by default. Dates in Sources, for example, allow entry of month and dates. It doesn't display them when viewing the source pane (unless you're editing the source), but does affect the order. There's no reason that can't be done down to the minute.
A agree with Julia though that it doesn't seem like a critical need. The information can also be added as a Custom Fact. Enter 'Twin of..." as a custom fact and mention whether the person was born first or second. FS should probably have a standard custom fact entry for twins or multiple births anyway.
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While adding times to the date field could be used for getting twins in the right order, it would pretty much always be a hack: how often have you encountered a birth time in a historical record? I know the time of birth for my twin and me because California has (had?) detailed birth certificates. I have to rely on my family's memories for my own child's time of birth, because Pennsylvania's birth certificates don't even give a birth place.
I think that a more useful expansion to its logical end would be to allow siblings to be re-ordered manually, regardless of multiple-birth status. That is, the default could be for them to be sorted according to the current rules (by date, then alphabetical, then by order entered), but they could be re-ordered (perhaps by drag-and-drop, like for custom sort in Sources) by users to display in whatever ordering they preferred. I don't know if this should be a by-user preference or a global change. (Come to think of it, I don't actually know whether custom sort in Sources is by user or global.)
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi , civil birth records in the area of Mexico I've been researching recorded the time of the birth declaration, and the time of the birth (accurate initially to the hour, and sometimes to the quarter-hour), from the very first one that was recorded, in January 1870.
On the other hand, I've run across several pairs of a civil birth record and a christening record where I believe both records are for the same child, but the date on the civil birth is different from the one calculated from the christening. In a few cases, the declared birthdate is after the christening! In one I looked at today, the christening was on August 5th, and the christening record said the child was born "yesterday"; the civil birth record was created on November 7th, and said the child was born on October 4th.
But I'm sure there are records out there that record the birth of twins, and which one came first, but not an exact time. So it might be a better feature to just be able to say "X was born before Y".
In fact, that could be more general; facts like "Spouse Z died before the marriage to Spouse W" to order marriages; or "residence in place A before place B", without a date for either.
And in some cases we just can't know. In fact, I recently came a across a record in the early 19th century where a pair of twins were christened with exactly the same name!
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@Carolyn Geiger I completely agree with the desire to have the ability to list twins in their proper birth order. It is a matter of being as accurate as possible. This issue will continue to increase, particularly in the US, as the number of multiple births continue to increase.
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