Add "cremation" or "unknown" to burial
I have come across a lot of obituaries that do not have what was done with the body. Sometimes it may say cremated and other times it doesn't say anything. Even if cremated it may not say what was done with the ashes. If burial isn't documented on the person I go looking for it only to find out cremated but the way burial is set up now there is no place to put that information.
Comments
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@Victoria Ann Hancock, it is under Other Information then Add Event. I agree it would be helpful and more visable if there were a check box or field in Vitals where you could more easily mark cremated.
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Cremation is just one of many ways to deal with remains after death; google search results has many pages with plenty of alternatives. Rather than providing an option on this site for "cremation" only; perhaps the larger question of which method was used should be addressed?
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Absolutely, I agree with @fbax . I have a cousin of a grandfather whose remains are somewhere in the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of Japan. His plane was shot down during WW II and all board were lost. That is neither burial or cremation.
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My father was cremated and then buried, and it is perfectly possible to record both of these facts in the Family Tree: burial under Vitals, cremation under Other Information.
Keep in mind that the Burial field is not mandatory. It exists primarily for historical reasons, as a substitute for death information in those times and places where vital events were not recorded, only church sacraments. If you have a person's exact death information, there is no reason to also enter substitute information for it, so for relatively recent deaths, this field is often superfluous.
As a result of this decreased usefulness, many people have expressed a desire to expand the field's scope into a more generic "disposition of remains" conclusion, with a corresponding re-labeling and other feature/content requests. I believe that such changes are unnecessary: if you want to use the field for not-a-burial, you're free to do so; you can explain things in the reason box. You can also, of course, continue to use the field for its original purpose, namely, as a substitute for death information for all of those people who never heard of civilized people cremating their dead, but for whom the priest carefully recorded only their burials.
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