Why no Description field for birth/christening/death/burial/couple events?
I can add ridiculously long descriptions to someone's residence event. But I can't add a description at all to any vital events.
Now that we can't enter non-standard placenames, or even add something to a standardized placename, it would be really helpful to add additional details in a description for vital events.
For example, if someone was born in a place whose name has changed in modern times, I might include the modern placename in the description to complement the historical standardized placename. Or if there's a church where the christening took place, but no standard placename for it, then it would be helpful to add that in the description. For the death event, I might add the name of the hospital. For a death, I might add "at home" or "auto accident at 13th and Main St". For the burial event, I might add cemetery plot details. For a marriage, I might enter the name of the church or municipal building, or for a divorce I might add the name of the court in the description.
Answers
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You have 2000 characters available in the Reason box.
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You very much can still enter a displayed placename that is not equivalent to the background ("standardized") placename.
Why do you believe that this is no longer possible?
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A reason statement is not a description. It's meant for a statement of why the editor believes the information to be correct.
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I'm using the family tree from a desktop web browser. If I try to add anything other than the exact standardized placename, when I save the information it changes it to only the standardized placename and deletes everything else.
Are you using some other interface?
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I use only the website via browser - mostly Firefox, occasionally Chrome. Windows 10, everything fully up-to-date.
A record I attached just today, shows that the underlying location and the displayed location are not the same. Screenshot from Firefox.
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Yes, the source linker tool can still include non-standard locations for events. But if you try to edit that location from someone's profile, the non-standard portion is deleted. (Or even if you try to enter a non-standard location for a brand new event on someone's profile directly.)
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Laptop rather than desktop, but same difference. (Firefox on the regular site, Edge if I need to check something in beta.)
To add a street address before the city/county/state, I type it in (with a comma to separate it), and then click on the reddish text at the top of the drop-down.
After I click "Save", this makes my typed text into the display value, and the first item in the drop-down into the background value.
Where does this process break for you?
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After I click Save, the extra data I added at the front of the standardized placename is deleted.
And in any case, adding non-standard text to the placename is not appropriate for all information that might be included in a Description field for these events.
For example, if a burial was officiated by Pastor Brown, that would be something I might include in a Description field.
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I went to Edge for this edit, to use Beta, since I don't like to play in the production platform. On that same record/profile, I edited the address to include a street. You can see from the screenshot that the standardized and the displayed addresses are not the same.
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I'm glad it works for you. I can't explain why it stopped working for me in the past week.
In any case, this doesn't answer my question. Why isn't there a Description field for these events?
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If you are expecting a definitive reply about how the New Person Page/Profile is designed, that's not something we users can answer.
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As another user of the site, my answer to "why isn't there a description field for Vitals conclusions" is, "what would anyone put in it?" You've given a few examples -- more detailed address, modern name of the place, name of the church/hospital/cemetery, cause of death -- but most of those can go in either the displayed placename or the reason box, or, if it's too complicated for either of those, then in a collaboration note. The reason box is actually seldom needed for actual reasoning, since source tagging serves that purpose much more easily, so Yet Another Text Box would be largely redundant, to my way of thinking. (And besides, as Áine said, the reason box has room: 2000 characters is plenty for both "auto accident at 13th and Main St" and "based on newspaper accounts for the place and death certificate for the date".)
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