Education event type

LegacyUser

Cathlyn Anna Harris said: Add education as an event type. We can add institution, start and end year. Might give us additional way to connect for memories, yearbook, school newspaper etc.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Cathlyn Anna Harris, Welcome to the FamilySearch Feedback forum on Getsatisfaction.com. Note that this forum will disappear in 3 days and changes preparing for the cutover will start tomorrow. A temporary forum on the FamilySearch Communities site entitled "Ideas" will be where all this stuff goes at that time, so just be aware when looking for responses to your posting.

Use the "Custom Event" type in the "Other Information" section of that person's record. Since education is a type that will be extremely rare and contained in a very tiny percentage across all of the 1.3 billion names in the database, it probably doesn't make sense to create a stand alone type. It clutters up an already long list and all tools that interface with FS (e.g., Ancestral Quest, Roots Magic, Legacy, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, etc.) will need to be updated to handle that specific exception.

The Custom Event type is really intended for these types of events.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Tools that interface with FS should not need updating because

EDUC (aka SCHOLASTIC_ACHIEVEMENT)

is a standard GEDCOM tag (in v5.5 at least) for individual attributes / facts. FamilySearch appears to have deliberately removed direct support for a number of GEDCOM tags, forcing us to use Custom Events / Custom Facts in their place. That in itself might (depending on what the interface code does) actually cause issues when synching between FS and something like RootsMagic that uses the standard GEDCOM tags.

Of course, I realise that (sarcasm alert, not directed at you Jeff, I must add!) FamilySearch cannot be expected to use the GEDCOM specification because it was set up by a rival organisation called... err, FamilySearch... Hmm.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Yes, GEDCOM was set up in 1984 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to aid in genealogical research (Wikipedia). The last update was based on a draft released in 1999. (Wikipedia)

Regardless, events and facts can be added in the "other" section of a person's profile as Jeff points out. The only problem is that there is no means to apply a source to any event in that section, so I usually refer to the source in the "Reason Statement"

There have been discussions about this lack of sourcing for "other" events/facts and suggestions put forth about using notes/discussions as source discussions. There are some internal problems with FamilySearch on setting up sources for the "other" section, one of which is the grouping of all "other" types together (a shortcut taken by the development teams per a comment by a FS representative).

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I know that FS is supposedly building in the GEDCOM-X direction. I've not researched it to know whether something like EDUC is defined or not, but I do know that each specific type tends to need its own processing. Not too long ago I discovered that Ancestral Quest was not getting a properly sync'ed value for Immigration events.

And yes, any source should be tag-able to any fact or event conclusion in the record (including couple relationship facts and events)

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Jeff, so far as I can read (which isn't meant to be sarcastic!) "Education" is indeed in the GEDCOM-X specification - see https://github.com/FamilySearch/gedco...

Section 2.1 on that link lists all the Fact Types that GEDCOM-X defines, including Education.

There are, on another link, examples of how Education, Occupation, etc, can be encoded in GEDCOM-X - see http://www.gedcomx.org/2014/05/30/ged... and search for "Education".

I've not compared the GEDCOM 5.5 list to GEDCOM-X but suspect that there are more types in GEDCOM-X. Quite how that lot gets through and is aligned to the limiited range in FSFT, I don't know. From GEDCOM-X to FSFT would seem fine - just insert the extras as Custom Facts. In reverse? Hmmm.

And, of course, telling people to use Custom Events for things like Education makes synching difficult if people call it Educated, School, College, etc, etc and all that doesn't get mapped onto Standard GEDCOM 5.5...