Recording burials and cremations

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terry blair said: With so many cremations taking place these days, instead of a work around via notes, etc. to record them, might it be reasonable to change the burial section to something like “Disposition of Remains” and have a check box containing the following: burial, cremation, other? If burial is chosen, a box opens with space for date and cemetery; if cremation is chosen, a box opens with space for (date of cremation if important) date and disposition of ashes; if other is chosen, a box opens with space for date and disposition. Which information is ultimately chosen then remains visible. To edit the information, you would simply click on the appropriate choice In the box and continue.

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Amy Archibald said: In the "Other Information" section is a heading for Cremation and it contains date, place, notes section already.

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Tom Huber said: Burial cites the cemetery where a deceased person's body is buried. If a person is created and their ashes are buried or placed in a mausoleum, I use burial for the location.

If all that remains is a cenotaph, then I record that in "Other Information". The word cenotaph is derived from the Greek kenos taphos, meaning "empty tomb." A cenotaph is a monument, sometimes in the form of a tomb, to a person or group of persons buried elsewhere.

For instance, my brother and his wife were killed in a tragic collision wherein very little remained of either of them. Their remains were cremated and my niece and nephews scattered their remains in a lake that he and his wife like to visit. There are two cenotaphs at a local mausoleum and I have noted them as such, but there is no burial.

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Don M Thomas said: I personally feel that cremation should go under the "Vital Information" area and "Burial" area. Yes, you can say there was no burial, but to me the "Burial," and "Vital Information area of the FamilySearch "Family Tree" is saying, what actually happened to their remains. Patrons will not be looking in the "Other Information" area, for what actually happened to their remains.

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terry blair said: Thank ;you all for pointing out where cremations can be entered, however I neither understand nor agree with the logic placing it there.

In my five plus years working with FTFS I didn't know it was there and I know I've entered several hundred cremations in the burial section because the ashes were placed in cemeteries. Does that mean that I, and perhaps Tom and others, should now go back and find all those entries and remove them from the burial section and place them under cremation in the "other" section? For me, that idea is a non-starter. Nor, am I going to try and find a date and location of cremation, as I don't think they are as important as the date and place of final disposition of any remains, a field which does not exist in the cremation section.

I am given to understand that in some places in the US something like 60-70 percent of current deaths result in cremations, which means that there are going to be lots of final dispositions entered in the wrong place, as I doubt many will be entered in the "other" category. And, judging from the complaints I read in this blog, who reads, or much less thinks about "other" information anyway?

Why is burial so important that it is placed in the vital information section, while cremation as a disposition is so unimportant that it gets placed in the "other" section? To me all final dispositions have the same weight, thus either place all final dispositions in the vital information section or "bury" them all in the "other" section.

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Don M Thomas said: I strongly agree with your above statements Terry Blair. Good points!!!!!!!!

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Adrian Bruce said: Interesting thoughts.

"something like 60-70 percent of current deaths result in cremations, which means that there are going to be lots of final dispositions entered in the wrong place, as I doubt many will be entered in the "other" category."

I personally would say that one can't be certain that they are in the wrong place until we've defined what the terms mean. And I'm not sure that we have clear agreement?

To me, Cremation is not, and cannot be, the final disposition. The final disposition is either the disposition of the ashes (burial or scattering) or the interment of a (non-cremated) body. (Leaving major accidents / disasters aside).

Cremation and final disposition of ashes should not be incorporated into the same event (no matter where it is on the person's page) because they can be on radically different dates (years apart in one instance I recorded recently).

On that basis, I would suggest:
1. The Cremation event in the Other Info section should be used only for the actual cremation itself - this ought to be communicated somehow.

2a). The Burial event in the Vital Info should be used for final disposition of remains - either the disposition of the ashes (burial or scattering) of a cremated body or the interment of a non-cremated body. (As suggested above) Again, this ought to be communicated somehow.

2b) In addition, the Burial event should have a Type that distinguishes interment of a non-cremated body, from interment of the ashes, from scattering of the ashes. With the default being "Unknown"?

3. And I rather like Tom's suggestion for a "Cenotaph" event(?) somehow, somewhere in Other Info (a new type of Event?) - that would apply to a number of WW1 deaths in my own family where the body currently has no known grave but a memorial inscription exists on things like the Menin Gate.

Incidentally, it occurs that we need to agree what happens to "final disposition" if there is a reburial. This is typical for many war deaths relating to WW1 and WW2 for the UK Forces where initial burial was in a small cemetery, often close to the battlefield, followed after the war by the exhumation of the remains and their subsequent reburial in one of the new, large cemeteries created by the Imperial / Commonwealth War Graves Commission. (Details of initial burial, exhumation and reburial can be found on the CWGC site, so it's more than just theoretical). (And there's King Richard III).

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Paul said: If there is an argument for extending the use of the Marriage section in Family Tree, there certainly seems a case for extending the use of the Burial one.

It does seem reasonable, for example, to record details of a reburial alongside the details of the earlier event - rather than isolate this information by showing it as a custom event in the "Other" section. Until recently (nowadays the pracice is mainly of cremation, following which the ashes are scattered at sea), the practice in Hong Kong was to exhume the remains after a few years and to reinter the bones elsewhere. Burying (excuse the pun) this important detail about the "final resting place" elsewhere in Family Tree does not seem quite right.

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Adrian Bruce said: Reburials are a challenge I think. On the one hand you need to concentrate on the first burial if it acts as a proxy for death. On the other, if you want to go and pay your respects, the current burial site is the important one.

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Don M Thomas said: Just yesterday entered two marriages for the same couple in the "Marriage Events," why not to burials in the "Burial" event?

I agree with Paul, it just does not seem right to have cremations in other parts of the "Family Tree." They should show in the "Burial" event.

As Terry Blair states above, "in the US something like 60-70 percent of current deaths result in cremations" and this percentage is only going to go higher as the cost of a traditional casket burial becomes economically unaffordable. FamilySearch needs to realize that there will be a change in the making as societies move forward into the future with the way the remains of our ancestors are dealt with, and putting them in "Other Information" is just not going to cut it.

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Adrian Bruce said: To be honest I'm not a fan of anything being in Other Information. Why does someone's occupation, e.g., get relegated below a line to an area where FamilySearch couldn't care less whether the claims are sourced or not?

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Tom Huber said: I'll add a couple of thoughts.

First, all events/facts, regardless of where they appear on a person's details page (or in their couple relationship pages, need to allow for source attachments. This is a major weakness in the current design of FamilySearch FamilyTree.

Second, the idea of additional information for the burial event is certainly worth consideration. Right now, we are left with adding notes in the reason statement, which can be wiped out with a merge or someone deciding to replace the reason statement with their own. So we are left with either adding a note, or for the purpose of making something more permanent (notes can be deleted), starting a discussion.

Third, if I am not mistaken, there is a practice of removing the remains to a boneyard or catacomb in Paris.

I had an interesting experience regarding one of my wife's relatives. The woman was cremated and later, when the family gathered to talk about disposition of the estate, they met at the graveyard where this relative wanted her remains to be buried and had a small service in memory of her.

This falls into the "story" class of information and hopefully my wife or someone else will document the event and enter it as a story about this woman, who had no children of her own.

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Paul said: With regards to what a complicated matter the recording information about deaths / burials / cremations / disposal of remains can be, I have just remembered two stories.

Firstly, I believe it was in a television drama (though I am sure this must have happened in "real life" on other occasions) that a family was portrayed as spreading some of their deceased relatives's ashes at one location, and later spreading the rest at another,

Secondly, the story of what happened following the novelist / poet Thomas Hardy's death:

"His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. His family and friends concurred; however, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner."

There were also a number of subsequent events (involving different dates and locations) that followed the death of the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin.

At present, I suppose we can use Memories to keep details of the various events close together in Family Tree, but I believe these examples do support development of an extended section on the person page, covering death-related events.

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Gordon Collett said: Fascinating discussion. And I thought life events were complicated!

I don't want to distract from this important discussion on design improvements, but do want to offer a couple of thoughts on Terry's question, "Why is burial so important that it is placed in the vital information section?"

My theory is that the Vital Information section is designed to mimic an old Family Group Sheet



which, I assume, is for the comfort of people who have never used anything but paper before coming to Family Tree. (Another theory would be that the Vital Information section is designed for the unique identification of a person, which name, birth information and death information does, and the Other Information section is for everything else about them.)

(The desktop program I use, Reunion, lets you put in the "vital information" section any of 34 different pre-defined events or any user-designed events, and arrange them in any order you want.



but back to the point.)

But why were the Family Group Sheets designed that way? I suspect the original thought was that one entered either the birth or the christening and either the death or the burial and it was only researchers' discomfort with blank lines that has led to the current practice of entering all four pieces of information if available.

Prior to 1815 in the area of Norway I mainly work in, sometimes earlier in other parts of Norway and at various dates in other parts of Europe, parish records did not record any civil events, just church events. Being born and dying were not church events, being christened/baptized (by the way, in Norwegian there is only one word that I know of for both terms) and being buried were church events.

Therefore, prior to 1815, the records I look at have no birth or death information at all, only christening and burial. The Family Group sheets must have been designed to accommodate this problem. I have seen older sheets that have just a birth and death line, nothing more, and one was required to type "chr." before the date in the birth date box and "bur." before the date in the death date box to record information from these older records.

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Adrian Bruce said: King Robert I of Scotland (aka Robert the Bruce) is another with what one might flippantly term a split personality after death.

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Adrian Bruce said: If all events and attributes were to be given the facility to be sourced in the same way as Vital Events, then the need to have 2 sections would disappear, excepting only that it is convenient to have a summary at the top.

In the same way that we can re-order the sections to our personal preference, maybe we should be able to promote event (types) for our view only between the "Other Information" section and the "Vital Information / Summary" section. Then anyone who prefers to have Cremation and Ashes-Interment in the "Vital Information / Summary" section could have that, while anyone who prefers to have Ashes-Interment in the "Vital Information / Summary" section but Cremation in the "Other Information" section could have that. Probably a longer term job, of course.

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Tom Huber said: Then there is the problem of FS FamilyTree being a shared, open-edit tree. What one relative wants for organization of records and what another relative wants are likely to be two different things.

We currently have a few cases where a patron has declared changes to select people as off-limits to anyone but them. The back-and-forth arguing is inexcusable, but if it extended to how records were organized (which events/facts are in which Information section), there would even more problems.

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Adrian Bruce said: "if it extended to how records were organized (which events/facts are in which Information section), there would even more problems. "

Totally agree Tom, which is why I was suggesting the organisation should apply only to our own view of (all) Person Records (you may have already realised this but were just putting the case against a different set of logic).

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Tom Huber said: That's an interesting prospect, Adrian. Right now, we don't have the ability, other than the order of the right column, to select what events'facts display in which information window.

I hadn't given that much thought, but it would be nice if we could, on an individual basis, not affecting any other patron's view, set up the events as we would want to see them.

Then it would make sense to be able to rearrange the way the information is presented. And, it would be nice to be able to do that, not only by patron, but by person, so if a person was Christened, but there is no birth record, then we could hide or move to other, the birth field. Same with other similar fields, such as death/cremation/burial/cenotaph/etc. field.

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Cynthia Louise Van Dam said: Thanks for the info. I have searched for an answer about how to record cremation and not found it under Get Help. Sounds like there is a fair amount of support for making cremation more visible. Remember that as the initial user, we can't just see cremation in other. I too have been using FS for a long time and didn't realize that was an option. I think that is the a serious disadvantage of Other. I understand about screen space, but unless you spend time looking at Other, you have no idea what the options are.

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Tom Huber said: In reading the various views on this matter and the various ways that remains of cremations are handled, perhaps we should ask that burial be relegated to the "Other Information" frame and leave it at that.

That way, burials, cremations, disposition of remains, and so on, all become equal. This would allow for initial burial site, reburial sites, and even "boneyard" disposition.

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Cynthia Louise Van Dam said: I agree that all these options should have equal weight. I don't mind them being in other. But if they are there, they need to be more obvious. Instead of Other and Add being the titles, could there be several smaller categories. These are just ideas. Please suggest better alternative. I would expect each of these to have their own dropdown menus.
Burial/cremation (include disposition of body and stillborn
Ethnicity/description
Profession/titles
affiliations/religious events.

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Don M Thomas said: I guess I am stubborn and hard headed, in that I see nothing wrong with just adding in the "Vital Information" and "Burial" section, an area for interring cremations.

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Juli said: My suggestion is to rename the sections in "Vital Information": Birth, Birth Rites, Death, Death Rites. Offer subcategories or labels under the sections, such as "Christening" and "Circumcision" (etc.) under Birth Rites and "Interment" and "Memorial Service" (etc.) under Death Rites. Perhaps even offer a radio button for "use as a stand-in for birth information" and "use as a stand-in for death information" for those cases where the church register only records the sacrament.

Similarly, the "marriage events" section could be relabeled "partnership events", and the available choice of types expanded to include civil union, church ceremony, etc. (Or at a very minimum, add an "other" category to the current list.)

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Paul said: In line with comments I have just posted at https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... I am broadly in agreement with Juli's suggestions.

Although the majority of individuals recorded in Family Tree probably did belong to a family that adhered to the beliefs of a Christian denomination, I do believe more universal terminology should be applied in general.

With regards to the event following death: as so many individuals, both now and in the past, have been cremated rather than buried it seems rather silly to not treat both events on an equal footing. To my mind it seems common sense to have one category (Death Rites or similar heading) in the vitals section, to cover an event close to the death. Any subsequent events (e.g. reinterment) could be shown in the Other section, to avoid confusion over the disparity with the death date.

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Tom Huber said: I agree. That is one of the reasons why I indicated as alternatives either

Vital Information include only name, gender, birth, and death...

or

Both sections (Vital and Other information) be combined, rather than separated

in the other discussion.

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David Newton said: One little wrinkle with treating cremation and burial equally is that some people are cremated and then buried .... Tricky one.

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Juli said: Cremation as an event is kind of odd on many levels. It's akin to treating "embalming" as an event: it's something that happens, yes, but the process or thing itself is not a public event. (Unless you're doing a funeral pyre, which is not really the same thing at all.) The result of the process becomes part of any subsequent public event(s), and determines some of the possibilities (people don't hold viewings if they've had their loved one cremated; if they've chosen embalming, people can hold a viewing, but can't hold burials in two different places, etc.), so it makes sense to record the fact somehow, but it's hard to come up with a label or categorization for it.

We buried my dad's ashes in his grandmother's grave. I consider that date and place his burial. The date and place of his cremation are on the same level as the date his death certificate arrived or the location of the funeral home that handled things: details that are somewhere to be found in the reams of paperwork, but which I haven't seen any reason to pursue.

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Adrian Bruce said: I think different people will have different views and we shouldn't enable one but not the other. For me, I have been to numerous funerals which were followed by a cremation. I think that I have only seen one set of ashes buried. So for me it's actually the funeral which is the important, public thing. Trouble is, for long years we have ignored funerals by focussing on the burials. It therefore seems weird and inconsistent (because it is) to talk about the funeral before a cremation but not the funeral before a burial. So if we talk about a burial, when moving to a cremation, we talk, not about the interment of the ashes (because almost no-one goes to that and it's hard to find out what happens and when) nor about the funeral (because we've never talked about funerals before burials) but we end up talking about the cremation. Or so it seems to me.

I think we need to enable recording of funeral, cremation, interment or scattering of the ashes (different things) or burial of the body.

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Tom Huber said: My wife's aunt was the last of her generation of children to pass on (she was more or less, the matriarch for that family). She had a funeral/memorial service and was cremated. Later, when the family gathered together to discuss the disposition of her assets (they couple had no children, so the assets were divided evenly among thirteen nieces and nephews), the family held a short service where her ashes were buried in accordance with her will's provisions.

Thus, there is the death, the funeral service, the cremation, and a graveside service, and a burial. The burial place and date have to do with an event that took place a number of weeks after her death and subsequent cremation.

In the case of my brother, he and his wife died in a tragic automobile accident that precluded any kind of burial. The remains of the accident were cremated (there wasn't much) and a cenotaph was set up at a local mortuary in remembrance of my brother and his wife. So there we have death, cremation, and no burial, but the placement of a cenotaph.

I have another relative who died somewhere during World War II. He was in the U.S. Navy and a cenotaph was set up at Pearl Harbor, but no grave.

This is very similar to the issue surrounding christenings/naming/infant baptisms, where the events may dictate one or more events, in addition to the birth (if ever recorded).

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Tom Huber said: As to my comments about combining everything into one section, sorting by date of event resolves any sequence issues. It is also a strong argument to combine the sections.

As far as Joe's comments are concerned, combining the events into one section is one of display for the person's details page, and has nothing to do with what will be used in the card or any condensed view of the person, such as the card reflected when you click on a name and produce a card with limited details.