Are there rules about date of birth and date of death?
Users are insisting to add dates of birth and death to individuals in the family tree that have no evidence of the date of birth and/or death because they are stating that there are "rules" for Family Tree. I have not ever seen such a rule and I am wondering if others have seen them?
For example on Michele, they keep adding a birth date based off the date of birth of one of the children, and then delinking potential parents for her based off of this made up date.
Answers
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I don't input any detail without evidence. However, many users justify using "about 1604, England" type inputs as they feel that adds to the chance that a search based on that detail is more likely to produce a possible, positive result than if the fields are left blank. Often, the inputs made are less than helpful, so I, too, am inclined to delete these "guesstimates".
Even if there is a christening that shows an exact date / location, I don't enter anything in the Birth field without evidence. Some of my ancestors / relatives were born hundreds of miles from they were either baptised, or brought up. Since, in such cases, the christening data is used in FamilySearch search routines as a substitute for missing (blank) birth data, it really is quite unnecessary to enter data in the Birth fields just for the sake of it, as many users apparently do.
I find a further problem where users enter, say, "after 1851" on the Details page for a death. I work a lot from the Landscape view of a family branch and, from there, one gains the false impression that the individual concerned actually died in 1851. On more than one occasion, I have found (after further research) an individual actually died over twenty years later than the "after…" date, so I definitely don't recommend this type of guesstimate input, either, and quite happily delete such entries.
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I agree that the arbitrary birth and death dates guesstimated based on the baptism date of the first or last child are next to useless and can actually be inhibitive. However, I'd suggest there is an argument in favour of the use of "about", "after", "before" and "between" in certain circumstances.
I use "about" if no baptism or birth record has been located but the individual appears in census records or has a death record where the age is listed. In my experience ages given in both census and death/burial records can be a bit wobbly factually, so giving "about" beforehand indicates the approximate birthdate can be assumed from those records, but there is a margin of uncertainty regarding how exact it is that should also be taken into account.
Similarly, not everyone was baptised in the same year they were born. 'Batch' baptisms of multiple siblings at once was not uncommon, so it can be necessary to indicate an estimated birth year rather than leaving it blank when the child was baptised at, say, five years old, but the exact birthdate isn't given.
Likewise, "after", "before" and "between" are useful when the exact death date is unknown but a general marker is known. For example, the individual appears in census 'x' and is subsequently listed a deceased on a child's marriage record in year 'y'. Not only does this serve as a marker for further research, it can eliminate the hazard of incorrect records being wrong assigned to the individual which would otherwise seem like a good match.
Of course when utilising these indicatives best practice is that the reasoning should also be made evident.
I can understand the frustration of the information being simplified in tree view and therefore being misleading. I use landscape view of the tree a lot myself. I would suggest this is a good argument for the addition of indicative abbreviations being added to tree view though, rather than an argument for removing information from an individual's profile.
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I believe a good rule is: if your don't know it (with documentation), then don't enter it. Just say "No" to "Junk Genealogy". I good example, in today's world, is guessing on the burial date but adding the month and/or year of the individual's death. Many times today they are not buried for months after their death.
…. just sayin'
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@Concetta Phillipps Have you tried asking them for a link to these supposed 'rules'? I am wondering if there is some faulty training going on that should be nipped in the bud, and/or perhaps someone has badly misinterpreted the Data Quality Score initiative.
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As someone who will often enter "estimated" Birth details derived from the Baptism / Christening details, I should perhaps explain my reasoning.
Much of my motivation comes from the time when merge suggestions were altogether too loose in their identifications of potential duplicates. I could ignore suggestions from the other side of the Atlantic, but clearly others couldn't. Putting the country from the Baptism into the Birth details would, I hoped, inhibit the weird merge suggestion in the first place. (It might be that the whole thing never worked that way but few of us knew). In such a case, I would enter "Probably England" into the Birth place and standardise it on "England".
For the date, I would usually enter the equivalent of "Before 1/1/1890" (or whatever the baptism date was). Yes, I know that this gets truncated badly in some views but the solution to that is surely for the engineers to tweak the display using codes like question marks, greater than or less than signs.
@MandyShaw1 - one of the issues with so-called training is that some of it is clearly within the FH community but surely is not reviewed by FamilySearch - I'm thinking of an instance where someone had been taught by a trainer that place names should exactly match the standard value - no prefixing with the church or hospital name etc. Quite why the trainer thought the FS software engineers provided that facility in the first place if it was not to be used, I daren't think. People may therefore think that something is policy, even when there is no FS evidence to that effect.
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@Adrian Bruce1 Sounds like a good reason for FS to maintain and advertise a set of standardised training materials (something for the research wiki and/or youtube perhaps). I imagine quite a lot of stuff exists already - perhaps the trainers are not clear what there is or where to find it.
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I have not seen any rules about requiring dates for births and deaths, but it is a decades long standard practice and with all standard ways of doing things you do have to periodically assess why it was every started, what "expert" declared things must be done in a certain way, and whether it has outlived it usefulness or is now causing more problems than it is solving.
You might be interested in this: https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/blog/estimating-dates-and-ages-genealogical-writing
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