Sorting Date is not added when attaching Findagrave.com memorials

LegacyUser

Merlin R Kitchen said: When attaching sources that are in the FamilySearch library but not a "hint" sometimes such as birth record or marriage record, the sorting date is automatically added.
I have been attaching a Findagrave.com source to many people, and I always have to add the death year in manually as the sorting date.
Can you please have the programmers add in the death date as the sorting date?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Find a Grave entries deals with where the person was buried, not their death. The information, if available, is entered by the person who created the Find a Grave memorial. And because the information is not sourced (other than maybe the information on the gravestone) the burial date is not included in the Find a Grave record. For some reason, FamilySearch used the death date as the burial date, which may not be accurate. In fact, it a significant number of instances, it isn't.

In the case of my brother and his wife, there was no burial. Their bodies (what remained of them) were cremated and their ashes scattered. The Find a Grave photos are of cenotaphs, not gravestones.

LegacyUser

Juli said: My dad died in 2011. We buried his ashes in 2012, and the stone was completed in 2014. Which date should go on his Find a Grave record?

Find a Grave documents burial location. It does not document any dates (beyond "before whenever the photograph -- if any -- was taken").

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Merlin, regarding your request, FamilySearch may not be able to do anything. The Find-A-Grave index belongs to Find-A-Grave and is simply imported from there from that site. There may be something about the structure of the data coming over that prevents that additional piece of information you would like to see being added. And there may be some conditions on that index that prevents FamilySearch from modifying it all.

Otherwise, I'm not completely sure what you mean by the sorting date. If I go to the Find-A-Grave database, find a record, then go to attach it, and move over the death and burial information to the Family Tree record, I see this:



The death date is there and properly standardized. There is not any other date to add. What do you see differently? What other date are you adding and where?

LegacyUser

Juli said: I believe the OP is talking about the sorting date for the citation on the Sources tab.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: OK, that makes sense. But I just attached one (not the above example) and that sort date was place on the source. I think it depends on the source. If the source does not have a death date, there will be no sort date. Likewise, birth records that just have a christening date but no birth date also do not get a year put on the source.

LegacyUser

Merlin R Kitchen said: Thank you Jeff. I feel better about it now, and will continue to do as I have been doing and entering a value that I think is correct for sorting.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yea, your choice is as good as anyone else's. And I can't see anyone arguing about a value put in there, since that value never shows up or has any impact ANYWHERE else other than the ordering of those sources. E.g., Timelines, Vitals, etc.--nothing is affected by them.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: When you start dealing with really long source lists, you may start to see the weaknesses of using the chronological sort. If you ever wonder whether or not there are other ways to do this, using the "Custom order" view of the sources will allow you to group the sources categorically. Obviously, anyone rearranging the custom order view in a source list will be seen by everyone using the categorical approach. It is more work but can be more intuitive when using very long source lists.

If you are ever curious about that, here is a topic that I created a year ago discussing some options there.
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...