How do you mark someone as being cremated?
How do you mark someone as being cremated. The Burial place doesn't know how to "standardize" this word.
Answers
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Only in response to someone who created a burial date for a person when I know there was no burial, I created a custom event called "In lieu of burial" and added a comment "He is not buried. Please do not try to add a burial date. His remains are with one of his children." I then deleted the burial information. I didn't mention cremation at all, and the other relative who was also cremated does not have burial information. No one has tried to edit her record to add a bogus one.
If you want to proactively add this, I would use a custom event.
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There has been much discussion on the general topic of cremation. Currently, the correct place to add details of a cremation is found in the "Other Information" section of the Person / Details page. Click on "Add Information" and select "Cremation" from the drop-down menu.
Unfortunately, this keeps the event details away from the Vitals section, so some users add the cremation under "Burial", adding a note that the "burial" detail actually represents details of the cremation.
An issue that divides many users is what event is best to record in relation to a cremation. Do you wish to highlight the date of the cremation ceremony, or place the importance on where and when the remains were finally laid to rest. The latter can create recording complications - notably when ashes have been divided and are then buried / scattered at different times and different locations!
In summary, there is the facility to record this as a custom event (under Other Information), but also the option to add data under "Burial" in the Vitals. A suggestion has been put that the Vitals could be updated to include a Burial / Cremation option. As cremations numbers are now far exceeding those for burials, it does seem to be reasonable for FamilySearch to reflect this fact by not keeping the inputted cremation details somewhat hidden, but by giving them parity with burials in their placement on the Person page.
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Paul W I didn't realize a suggestion has been made to include cremation to the burial event. That should really be opened up to any form of knowledge about the end state of remains. I stumbled upon a 4th or 5th cousin of mine who was in WW II. I'm not sure what status was told to his family, but after the death of both parents, Fold3 shows the declassified date of a report of him listed as a gunner in the Pacific in a plane that was shot down. No bodies were recovered. I just tried to find his record without success, but for the many, many people who have a disposition of remains unknown, or only generally known, burial / cremation isn't enough.
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The reason you can't "standardize" the word "cremation" as the burial place is that it isn't a place. That word does not belong in that field. As Paul pointed out, there is a Cremation option under Other Information, you can use that.
I generally treat the "burial" conclusion as shorthand for "final disposition of remains". The reason the field exists and is in the Vitals section is that it can serve as a substitute for a missing death record -- many old church registers recorded the sacrament, not the vital event connected to it. For more recent deaths, where cremation becomes the norm rather than the incredibly rare exception, such death proxies aren't needed. What people actually care about, instead, is "where can I pay my respects?" If the answer to that is "in so-and-so's living room", I would put that in the reason box for the burial, not in the burial location field.
Again as Paul pointed out, it can get complicated, especially when the ashes are divided up and "disposed" separately. Again, that reason box is your friend. If it's a particularly long saga, put it in a Note on the Collaborate tab and refer to it in the reason box.
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Julia Szent-Györgyi Burial is NOT necessarily the same as a final disposition of remains. It needs to be kept with its real definition that you are BURIED or possibly interred above ground at a cemetery or at some other location. That is why some additional options via slashes should be added or burial needs to be replaced with just "disposition of remains". Also location needs to be optional, or have the ability to be caveated with "presumed" which is currently not the case. How can you add a location if you don't know where or aren't sure where the person's final resting place is. This is typically a war time issue and we need to be able to honor our dead with as much truth as possible, but people vanish after all kinds of events: the San Francisco earthquake, 9-11 Twin Towers, etc. etc.
Examples below, which are NOT UNIQUE. Everyone has these ancestors. Burial location options are not adequate for these individuals
I have 3 ancestors who served during the Civil War and either died of disease or were killed in battle. The state (ie US State) where two of them are buried is up for speculation. Their family cemeteries in Indiana have markers and those cemeteries are labeled place of burial, yet the locations of their deaths were Tennessee and Virginia, at times when thousands were dying. No one is speculating on location of the remains in the third case, although location of death was Tennessee near a cemetery that today has more than 7,400 graves of unknown Civil War soldiers.
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@Gail Swihart Watson, I don't disagree with anything you wrote, except for the part about keeping that field's definition strictly as burial.
Not everyone is buried, and even if they are buried, we cannot always know where and when. Conversely, some bodies are buried more than once. Yes, it would be nice if there were features in Family Tree explicitly designed to handle the various possibilities, but that would get Really Complicated, Really Fast. There are just too many variations. So I think it makes more sense to use the tools and fields we do have to record the most important details in the Vitals box. For the Burial field, I think the most important detail is the final/current resting place, or whatever is known or not known about it. So for your Indiana-versus-Tennessee example, you'd put the location of the cenotaph in Indiana for the burial place -- it's where people can put flowers on All Saints, after all -- but note in the Reason box that it's merely a cenotaph. The location of death in Tennessee can be seen from the Death field, so there's little reason to repeat that information under Burial.
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Julia Szent-Györgyi I actually wasn't saying (or at least didn't intend to say) that the field should be kept as burial. I thought the word itself should stay specific. I think the field should be renamed disposition of remains with a SHORT drop down of options, one of which is an open comment field. If databases today can't take a comment as a field name, then have "other". In a notes section (currently called reason this is correct) is where we should be able to list locations ashes were scattered, or add any story associated with the last disposition of remains (such as why my parents' ashes are in a closet in my brother's house. That will eventually turn into a family story in and of itself soon... but I digress.)
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