I can't enter a burial date in the future.
Virginia Williams Owen nee Murphy (G7H4-FKZ) died on the 22nd and will be buried on the 29th. Today is the 25th. I can only enter January 2022 for her burial date. When I try to enter 29 January 2022 the entry fails to save. Is this a bug?
Answers
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No. Entering future dates would not be a bug. Tree records past/historical dates ... It might be interesting to see if it accepts on the 29th - my best guess might be it would accept on 30th?
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In December 2021, I entered in a future burial date on my grandma's cousin and it worked just fine. Perhaps this is a new update that prevents it?
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I believe it did work before as I have entered people from obituaries where the funeral service and burial were in the future. As to the FS system being about the past, well, she IS dead so her future burial date is really immaterial in terms of system integrity. I have seen FS subtly change from day to day before and I suspect someone tweaked a data check rule (as intended/designed or not) in response to some development work. From experience working with developers, I could see putting a 'window' of future dates in so you couldn't enter a future date more than a few months in the future but denying a burial date four days in the future is a bit of overkill to me.
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interesting ... I'm open to being wrong. I don't know that being a future date is why it would not accept - just a guess. I just tried in beta.familysearch and it did fail for entering the 28 Jan 2022 there - but it did allow 25, 26 and 27 Jan 2022. Perhaps someone from development can let us know... Maybe there is a threshold of a couple days only ...
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I don't understand why one would want to enter an event due to take place at a later date. Surely there's the possibility any such event might be cancelled, due to unforeseen circumstances? Why not just wait those extra few days, to ensure the event goes ahead without problems, and perhaps adding the finer detail relating to what actually took place, rather than speculating on a future matter?
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Bug still happening. It wants to claim that the 2-days-in-the-future burial date is a death date. But the record already has a death date 6 days in the past. This used to be acceptable.
I thought I had saved yesterday's screenshot. But the following screenshot is from 17 April 2023.
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What is the bug? You can't enter a burial date in the future, but that's a data safeguard, not a bug.
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@Alan E. Brown Well for starters, the error message is claiming I tried to enter a future death date, not a future burial date.
Secondly but primarily, I contend that future burial dates by mere days should be allowed. I know they used to.
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Over the years, FamilySearch has enhanced its data integrity checking. Dates in the future may have been allowed in earlier versions of Family Tree, but that is no longer the case for burial or cremation (since January 2022). That additional checking was a conscious decision, and it's unlikely to change. As others have noted, it's a very questionable practice to assume with certainly that something in the future will happen. Just wait until it happens and then document it.
But I do agree that it's odd that the error message is "The death date cannot be in the future" when you attempt to save a burial or cremation date in the future.
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Death Date != Burial Date, this should be allowed as long as there is a validly populated death date.
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