Why does attaching a source like census overwrite date of birth?
When you attach a source, like census, it gives you the option of attaching other details from the record, such as year of birth. But if you do that, the year of birth from the source will overwrite the exact date of birth that was already on the person's Details page. So instead of the exact date, you now only have a year. Why can't FS fix this glitch?
Answers
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@Mary Munk What you describe has not happened in my experience. If the profile has a date in the birth field, the option is not available to add the year of birth from the census.
For example in this 1900 census, the month and year are listed for Josephine, but there is no option to copy that information to her profile because her full date and place of birth have already been entered.
If you have experienced the process you describe, you may want to post the details in the New Source Linker Feedback group, in case the engineers in charge of the project need to address the issue.
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This happened with the England and Canada census. Here is an example:
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/changelog/GW3W-F1T
You can see that I had entered the exact date of birth in Dec 2023. Then someone recently deleted the 1881 census source for all the family members. Then she readded the 1881 census source. When she re-added it, the year from the census source overwrote the exact date of birth. I had to go back for all the family and re-enter the exact date of birth. She did this on several of my families. Have not been able to contact them through chat.
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Looking at the change log for GW3W-F1T, the date of birth appears to have been changed manually, not by adding a census record.
You added an exact DOB on 16 Dec 2023, but another user changed it to just a year on 27 Jun 2024. And you changed back to the exact DOB on 28 June of this year.
This does not appear to be an issue with how FamilySearch attaches records. The tree is fully open-edit: anyone can change the information. The good news is that anyone can correct it.
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Okay, that's a relief that it doesn't overwrite. But it means she actually went in and changed the exact date of birth to just a year for the whole family. That's beyond my comprehension. And a problem with open-source. Beginners do weird things. Sigh.
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