Obituary Death date

CarlWhiting

The newspaper clippings may not have a publication date but states that the person died on Wednesday. There has been a handwritten date of the newspaper publication. It seems the year should be able to be used for the death date. Direction?

Mirevo

Interesting question, and here is an articule that indicates how to index dates un specified dates.

1. Many obituaries do not include an exact death date. Do not try to determine the date meant by statements such as “He died last Wednesday.” If a death date is not stated, you typically should use the most recent date on the document other than a birth date.

It state to use the most recent date on the document- newspaper-

I am aware that more instructions are to come regarding indexing dates on this type of project. The instructions on how to index come from the owners or guardians of these projects. :)

👍️

Melissa S Himes

Yes, until there are better instructions, we should probably not use the most recent date. Currently this set of instructions tells us that if the death date is not recorded, mark the fields blank using Ctrl + B.

However, the Death Year field help does say we can use contextual information from the document, so we may be able to index the year.

The Instructions have been updated today (May 5th):

• If a death date was not indicated, you may index the publication date as the death date.
• Sometimes multiple images will contain information about the same person. These record on different images should be indexed separately.
• When a record has a newspaper clipping attached to a card on the same image, you combine and index the information from the card and newspaper.

marni anderson

I would use the hand written date

CarlWhiting

An answer from a past similar project indicated to use the year information to fill in the death date. How do we get a definitive answer.

Melissa S Himes

Carl, I know this is being worked on. I think we should see a definite answer on Monday or Tuesday!

Melissa S Himes

@CarlWhiting The instructions and the field helps have been changed:

• If a death date was not indicated, you may index the publication date as the death date.