Death date with a range causes "The death date is missing a year" message
The source linker can create a death vital when a death registration source is attached. By default, the date of death is set to the year, in spite of the fact that the quarter is also provided in the source. If I change the death date from the source linker's value of "1916" to "from April 1916 to June 1916", the PQS output includes a message "The death date is missing a year.". That message would not have been output if I had left the date as the less precise original value.
I suggest that the PQS should recognise a date range and not complain if the range is less than or equal to a year (even if the start and end dates are in different calendar years). This probably applies to other vital elements.
An example of this behaviour is in the profile for Florrie Chappell.
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I agree with the basic request but my inner mathematical and programming pedants do wish that FS would recognise that "from April 1916 to June 1916" is different from "between April 1916 and June 1916". The first is a duration, the second is a range - both should be recognised as standard dates. FS only recognises the first.
Someone dying "between April 1916 and June 1916" makes perfect sense.
Someone dying "from April 1916 to June 1916" indicates an incredibly long death.
It's perhaps even worse if someone is born "from April 1916 to June 1916" - that poor mother going through a labour that's three months long…
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@Adrian Bruce1 and as for marriages, 'from … to' could mean a very short marriage. I recently did some work on the profile of an individual who murdered his wife the day after they were married.
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@JulianBrown38 - you highlight a potential ambiguity with the marriage event that we almost never see in reality.
Does the "Marriage" event refer to the length of time that the couple were married? Or to the wedding ceremony itself? In practice, even my inner pedant can't remember any instance where someone has interpreted it as the length, but the phrase "marriage from X to Y" surely is liable to make the reader think of the length of the union?
That's one of the reasons why I do wish FS would allow "Between X and Y" as a standard date phrase. If they did, then it could be used to define the range within which a single day event takes place, without any ambiguity over whether it was a range or a length.
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