Estimated birth year for Dutch death records
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Jordi Kloosterboer said: I have come across several Dutch death records that have an age listed in the record, but no estimated birth year as is easy to calculate. Also, I come across these records via the hinting system, but cannot seem to search for them manually... Try looking for this record: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/619...
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Lundgren said: Thank you for your suggestion.
I agree with you that it seems like an estimated birth year could be possible. They do that in the US census records after all. I will pass it along to the team over the data. This may be more difficult for this collection however, as it is a mixed data set, containing all vital records, where as a US census record is just one type of record that contains the exact same information in every record.
As to why this person cannot be located from the search, we will investigate this further. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.0 -
Paul said: Jordi
I do not see why an estimated birth year is so important to you. In the case of the census, I often find three successive census records (say for 1851, 1861 & 1871) have totally different ages and birthplaces, so I would rather it were not easy for this detail to be carried across (if the fields have not been previously completed), as the detail needs to be verified first.
Personally, I dislike the ease in which census and other source detail can be transferred directly to the Person page, as the place and date is so often totally wrong.0 -
Jordi Kloosterboer said: The estimated birth year comes from the age on the record that is indexed. Without the estimated birth year, I have to calculate the estimated birth year myself each time. It is not as easy as just looking at the programming doing it itself. The reason why I like the estimated birth year is so that if it is way off from what it should be, then I can investigate further. Programming is there to make our lives easier and estimated birth years do that.0
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Paul said: I suppose I am of a generation where we don't need a calculator to immediately know the estimated year of birth if a person was (said to be) 83 years old when he died in 1845!
Having any estimated date can just lull you into a "false sense of security", especially when an original record shows, say, a person was "over 21" when he married in 1831. FamilySearch records are always indexed with an age OF 21 in these cases, leading to an assumption that a person was born around 1810, when they might have been born thirty years earlier. I have found ages shown in records are notoriously unreliable, so do not find estimates much use at all.0 -
Jordi Kloosterboer said: You are talking about records that are not from the Netherlands. In my experience, most Dutch record keeping is pretty accurate, unlike some US and UK records. But I do understand what you are talking about as I have done research in all three areas.0
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A van Helsdingen said: I agree- Dutch records tend to be far more accurate than in many other countries. Ages at death are usually reliable, except for people born before the introduction of civil registration in 1811.0
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Brian Rhees said: Thanks for bringing this issue up Jordi!
I looked into why that record was unable to be found in the search system and found that collection (Netherlands, Archival Indexes, Vital Records, 1600-2000) had most of the prefixes in the surnames duplicated in the search index (so I eventually found the record by searching for "De De Wilde")
I requested the collection be reprocessed (it is mostly done; but still updating some of the records). This specific record has been updated so you're able to find it with the expected surname: https://www.familysearch.org/search/r...
I also double-checked and we do have an estimated birth date in the search system for this record; so it is able to use that info if provided (but may not be what you were looking for since it still doesn't show up on the details/merge page)0 -
Jordi Kloosterboer said: Thanks for fixing the duplicate "tussenvoegsel" prefix issue. How come the estimated age is only for search and not shown in the indexed record?0
This discussion has been closed.