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Exact dates known, but not able to find by them

mpkenefick
mpkenefick ✭
July 13, 2021 in Suggest an Idea

I sometimes have exact DOB / DOD for people. But I may or may not have the correct name or whole name. When I am doing a search / find I cannot mark the dates as exact. That needs to be added.

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New · Last Updated July 13, 2021

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  • Paul W
    Paul W ✭✭✭✭✭
    July 14, 2021 edited July 14, 2021

    @mpkenefick

    Are you raising two issues here?

    Your first comment, "...I may or may not have the correct name or whole name", suggests you do have an exact date, but no reliable name to which you can input this detail. I believe I have only ever encountered this problem on one occasion. This related to a woman whose name was not mentioned in the parish register marriage entry (late 16th century, when omitting the bride's name was the practice in certain parishes). At her burial, she was referred to as "the wife of Robert Payne". So, I have a marriage date and burial date for a person I cannot identify. I do not like adding "Unknown" as a name, nor a format like "Mrs Payne", so I have found this a problem, for which I have no easy solution. Of course, others might be quite happy to break with standard practice, by at least recording some type of name for Robert Payne's wife.

    What I see as a second point, is in your sentence, "When I am doing a search / find I cannot mark the dates as exact". Maybe I am misunderstanding your point, however, and you are talking about not being able to input names as exact, not a dates - when, in your first sentence, you imply you do have exact dates. If you are talking here about not having an exact date, you can always enter something like "about 1780" - "about", "before", etc. being accepted by the program as "standard" inputs. Again, I dislike this practice in many cases - especially if someone has no idea when (say) a birth took place, and makes their (birth year) input based on an assumption the individual was 21 (or 25) years old at the time of the known marriage date. (My relatives were anything between 15 and 65 when they married, so I hate "guessed" ages that are based on "averages"!)

    Hopefully, you will receive other responses here - probably very different to my ideas! But, sorry if I have totally misunderstood your points and my comments do not address your problem(s).

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