Allow CREMATED to be an accepted burial place
Under burial, anytime I put in "Cremated", it pops up as a red exclamation mark/error that says: Missing Standardized Burial Place / This person does not have a standardized burial place. Many people are choosing cremation these days. I think it makes sense to allow the word to be recognized in this space.
Comments
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Similar points have been made here on a number of occasions. The main argument would really be for a change of title of that Vitals item - say to "Burial / Cremation", or the creation of a completely separate Vitals item, headed "Cremation".
Until FamilySearch developers decide this area of the "Person page" should be revised, you need to ignore the Burial field and add details of the cremation under the heading found by going to "Other Information", then "Add Information" - which has a "Cremation" section, which allows for input of the full details.
BTW - where are you inputting "Cremated"? If you are trying to add it under "Place of Burial" it will naturally not recognise this as an existing place name, and then produce the data warning flag you are seeing.
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Another option is to treat it as you do a burial. You would never put just Buried in the place field. You put the place someone was buried. So you could put where the person's ashes were interred. Something like this:
As you can see, there is no data error. This is a perfectly acceptable way to enter such information.
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Only works if the cremains are buried....what if you do not know the disposition?
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I still think a field labelled "Burial / Cremation" is by far the simplest solution - possibly with an either/or option. Okay, our ancestors were mainly buried, but in future cremation will be by far the more common ceremony, so it can't continue to be hidden away under "Other Information" forever.
Perhaps I am missing something here (especially in not being a LDS Church member) but surely a cremation event has the same value as a burial event, in terms of "vital(s)" data?
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I think that it should be added as an option in burial, not as "other information".
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Please make it so we can add Cremation as a STANDARDIZED burial choice. Many of us have the details and could put it in the note box for our ancestors.
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This is a common request on this forum, as should be expected with the number of cremations now far exceeding burials, throughout the world.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the facts attached to a "cremation" are not quite so clear as when referring to a burial. Whilst some would want the event to represent the actual cremation ceremony event, others would like the event linked to a "final resting place". Further, whilst it is probably unusual for parts of a body to be buried in more than one place (the novelist / poet Thomas Hardy being a well-known exception), it is probably fairly common for the ashes of the deceased to be divided and scattered at different locations.
So, not necessarily so straightforward in recording cremation data, compared to that for a burial.
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could it be as easy as allowing the word "cremation" to be recorded in either the burial date or burial location lines?
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@dorothy badger, as "cremation" is neither a date nor a place, no, it is not that easy. The word does not belong in either of those fields. Date and place fields have a datestamp or a geocode associated with them, which is used in all searches and other algorithms, such as Record Hints. Making an exception to this fundamental function makes no sense.
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Then please make a place for "other" under Burial. There are many options, one not mentioned is a cenotaph. There is an option under born for "at sea". There needs to be an option for other types of burials.
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I don't know if this is new, or just nobody noticed it before (including me) , but there's actually a Cremation field under Other Information → Events. It has the standard fields for date, place, and "Reason This Information Is Correct". Only one cremation event can be added, which, barring zombie apocalypse is all anybody would need.
This actually gives more flexibility, because you can enter that event and use the Burial field for where and when the ashes were spread. Granted, you can only enter one place, but if the ashes were spread multiple locations, I just discovered "World" is a standardized location, which sadly, still doesn't work for all situations.
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AMEN!
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I don't think burial should be the default at all. I think that fact should be "Disposition of Remains" should be the title of the field. I'm all good with "Burial" being the first option, "Cremation - buried" as the second, "Cremation - not buried" as the third, "Unknown or Unverified" being the 4th, and any other descriptor to cover people from all over the world who have vanished in times and places where persecution or war was going on. I know people from the former Yugoslavia who never verified what happened to a relative. I have a cousin of an ancestor who went down in the Pacific during WW II. I have a direct Civil War ancestor whose death location is known, but burial location is not. Life is not clean, and the "burial" option is insufficient.
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My suggestion is to leave the date, but have a check box for BURIAL, CREMATION, UNKNOWN, OTHER. Have a section appear next to the box to type information.
Sometimes a person may be cremated but are also buried (like my brother).
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Thank you for your suggestion. Your idea has been forwarded to the appropriate manager.
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Yes, I agree that cremation is different. ShirleySaffle1 said her brother is cremated and buried, however my parents are cremated but not buried. In fact they are not even at a cemetery at all. I have an aunt and uncle whose cremated ashes were combined and scattered in 2 locations. Thus, cremated is not really one choice, it is many. I really believe Disposition of Remains with a big drop down list (that includes a free entry text option for OTHER) is the only logical choice today.
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How to enter that a person is not burred after death (i.e. cremated)?
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on each person's page, you can use OTHER INFORMATION section (Add Additional Information) and use the Cremation tag in the drop down menu (with date/place/reason)
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I wold like to see something like a checkbox in the death information for 'Cremated' and then field facts for "cremains buried', "cremains scattered", "cremains kept by relative" and respective fields to allow for places, dates, or persons where buried/scattered or who holds the cremains. I think this would be ideal .
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M.H. Kecko Thank you. You must have read a post of mine on this. My parents' "cremains" are indeed with a relative in his closet waiting for my siblings and I to figure out what we want to do. This has an implication on RTorchia 's comment that only one cremation event is needed. Not necessarily so.
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I suppose FamilySearch developers continue to overlook the issue of treating Burial and Cremation with comparable status (especially as a record in Vitals) due to the majority of the profiles in Family Tree representing individuals who lived / died before cremation became common practice. However, they do now appear to be behind the times in not allowing for at least an "either / or" option under Vitals.
One problem that has been mentioned (when this issue has been raised previously) is along the lines of what constitutes the cremation event. Usually quite straightforward with a burial - the place being recorded as the location where the individual was interred. However, the "final resting place" (that some users might wish to treat as the "event" related to a cremation) would often not match the place where the cremation took place. There would probably still be requests for a prominent place (say the Vitals section) where either the cremation took plce, the ashes were scattered, or where the urn containing them is /was located.
So maybe not quite so straightforward in recording cremation facts as with a burial.
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Good explanation, @Paul W . I have several ancestors in that category. Someone added a burial event to my father and actually statued burial status unknown. I deleted the burial event and added a custom event "In lieu of Burial" where I stated the location of his ashes (in my brother's house) and a request that no burial event be added as he and my mother are not buried. They are, however, cremated.
I have several ancestors who died during wars, and the remains of at least 2 of them are in an unknown location, or let's put it this way: one location of death was the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan in a plane that was shot down over the ocean, and the other ancestor is presumed to be one of unknowns in the Memphis National Cemetery Civil War section. His place of death is well recorded - down to the name of the hospital, but then the record goes cold other than he was not buried in his hometown. That cemetery has the second largest collection of unknown military burials in the US.
These men don't really fit into the "burial" scenario either. I suspect there are millions like them.
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There basically is a "place in burial to say Cremated": the reason box. (It's not like there's anything else that really belongs in there, usually.)
The "proxy" events in the Vitals box (Christening and Burial) are there for historical reasons, and will always apply to our distant ancestors for whom records of sacraments are the best we've got. However, these fields are increasingly irrelevant or ambiguous for more recent people. For example, my father was cremated and then buried -- over half a year later, on a different continent. The burial location answers the question of "where do I pay my respects?", but it is completely unsuited as a substitute for his death location.
Perhaps what FS needs to do is re-label Christening and Burial according to their purpose in the Vitals box: "if Birth is empty, use this event, which is a [Baptism|Naming|Other]", and "if Death is empty, use this event, which is a [Burial|Cremation|Other]".
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My husband's parents were cremated and under burial, we put cremated and where the ashes were scattered. We also put in "Notes" the information.
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The cremation still occurred on one date. Tracking everything that happened with the remains could be done in the comments or just considered out of scope for this project.
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mod note- I have merged several ideas about Cremation being added as on option in Burial into one place. If you feel any of your own comments are now redundant, please flag the comment and ask me to remove the superfluous post.
You may be interested in https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/10023#Comment_10023
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It definitely needs the options, but I do think for cremation it should have 2 options, buried or not, we don't need to know if and where they were spread or who's mantel they are on.
But as others have said and I agree, Buried, Cremated 1&2, Donated and Unknown
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FamilySearch team,
In more recent times and costs, often a person is cremated and not buried. It would be nice to have an option to put that information in instead of assuming that everyone is buried. So it could say Cremated Remains instead of burial. It could easily be a dropdown selection.
Also, different customs exist all over the world and we need to be aware of different situations. Sometimes remains are scattered and sometimes they sit on a mantle in an Urn and sometimes people are deceased in other ways.
Thanks,
Claire
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There is an option of Cremation as an Event under Other Information.
The burial field exists primarily for historical reasons: it is used as a substitute for death information in places and times where only the church sacraments were recorded, not vital events. If it doesn't apply to a person, then you can simply leave it blank. You're also free to expand its use to a more general "disposition of remains", with an explanation in the reason box: "Date is of funeral, place is of Aunt Sue's hall closet."
This has been a recurring suggestion on all of FS's various forums over the years. I think one reason for the lack of any change is that broadening the purpose of the field can already be done by users without any work from FS.
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Where are those latest posts that it is being suggested have been added to this thread? I can't see anything beyond 30 September. And I'm sure this is not the first time I've been misled to believing there's a new post when this does not appear to be the case:
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