Running Gramps 6 under Mint 22.1
After a rather long hiatus, I have re-started with the current version under Mint and am now in the process of finding where I need to resume.
As my first task I set out to verify what I currently have in my data and media.
When I run the data verification tool, I get a number of “invalid —- date” errors.
Many of these are/seem to be due to partial or empty date fields.
Having ‘unknown’ as a string does not work either.
Any help or comments are welcome.
The tool seems to be working as expected. It found date entries that were either incomplete or invalid. “Unknown” in a date field is an invalid entry.
Using ‘unknown’ was a test, since keeping the date field blank/empty also gives an ‘invalid date’ error.
It is perfectly acceptable to have invalid dates in your family tree if that is the only information provided by the source/citation.
The Verify the Data tool only lists those invalid dates and you can choose to ignore that advice by marking and hiding the result if needed.
Unvalidated text string as dates are also supported. Some of these strings might in date forms that Gramps can parse. You may want to store a date exactly how it is represented in a source while indicating that string tends to be double converted or misinterpreted. (Such as a gravestone that has baptismal and burial dates inscribed instead of birth and death dates. Or with a different calendar system. Or in a different language.)
GEDCOM imports may have dates unexpectedly stored this way. The format specifically allows dates stored as text strings instead of the the GEDCOM standard “d mmm yyyy” format. The importer plugin for Gramps assumes this is intentional and preserves that format.
If you want to pass some “Gramps recognizable” date strings back through the Gramps parser, you can do that as a post-import process via SuperTool. Or the Find&Replace Date Gramplet, an Isotammi addon. However, you’ll want to closely oversee such re-parsing. (See the Date Scripts sub-section of the SuperTool Scripts list.)
There is an addon filter rule that find Events with “invalid” text string dates.
Thank you all for your comments.
After receiving them, I investigated this issue some more and I’ll now add a few more details.
a) being able to ignore invalid dates is a useful feature, but there needs to be a way to either fix or explain why the given date may not fit the ‘expected’ format as Emyoulation explained in more detail.
That explanation is much appreciated.
b) what still bothers me about the test run though is that for some of the people the ‘invalid date’ ‘error’ is shown for events for which I have enough information to be sure it took place.
For me blank date, or for that matter any other empty detail, is not erroneous, but simply ‘missing’ and perhaps my interpretation of the error message is just simply too literal. My apologies.
Because of that I was surprised, when clearing the date field content, I still got the same error.
Which is also a caveat in the filter pointed out by Emyoulation.
Many thanks also for pointing me to Supertool etc. – more work and food for thought 