Reported age or birth date in non-birth/baptism event

[GeorgeWilmes]

My comments and questions here are somewhat related to the current discussions in “Form Actions - User Editing of Action Detail” and “Date quality in GEDCOM exports”, but I feel they are different enough to warrant a separate discussion.

I don’t currently use forms, so I’m trying to decide on a simpler approach that I can follow for storing information about a person’s age or birth date that comes from sources other than a birth or (infant) baptismal record. So for example, a record that gives the person’s age as of a given date (immigration, marriage, census, etc.), or a record that gives the person’s birth date (military, death certificate, etc.). I want something more robust than merely attaching notes.

I’m leaning toward creating attributes at the person+event level. (When I create a census event, for example, I link the same event to each member of the household. So I don’t want to use a shared attribute, but rather an attribute that is tied only to that person+event, since each person in the household has a different reported age.) In the case of a census record, I would create an attribute “Reported Age”. In the case of a death certificate, I would create an attribute “Reported Birth Date”.

In the case of a marriage event, this would require me to have the event tied to the groom and the bride, so that each person can have their own person+event attribute containing their Reported Age at the time of marriage. I read here that “Sharing an event with roles bride and groom is not the recommended approach in Gramps.” So I have always tied marriage events to families rather than persons.

Question #1: What are the implications of tying a marriage event to the groom and bride in addition to the family, apart from seeing it appear twice when looking at a person’s events? I would only do this in cases where I want to attach a Reported Age, which I would do only when the age was significantly different (say, more than +/- 2 years) from the expected age based on their birth date.

Question #2: My proposed attributes show up nicely in the “Complete Individual Report”, for example. But they don’t show up in the Attibutes gramplet in either the People category or Events category views. This is understandable, since they are not person attributes or event attributes, but rather person+event attributes. Is there another way to view or search for them?

Question #3: I think it would be most useful if I could have the Reported Age attribute appear as a column next to the (calculated) Age column in the Events gramplet. I’m not ready to code my own gramplet, but I suppose one solution would be to clone the Events gramplet and add a column. A more general solution might be to enhance the Events gramplet to allow the user to select additional columns (i.e. person+event attributes). Or possibly another solution would be to expose person+event attributes in other ways (separate gramplets, filters, etc.). Do any of those ideas make sense?

Thanks for any feedback, especially before I go to the trouble of creating hundreds of these attributes and adding grooms and brides to marriage events.

[Nick-Hall]

@GeorgeWilmes

Question #1: What are the implications of tying a marriage event to the groom and bride in addition to the family, apart from seeing it appear twice when looking at a person’s events? I would only do this in cases where I want to attach a Reported Age, which I would do only when the age was significantly different (say, more than +/- 2 years) from the expected age based on their birth date.

I would really like to remove family events from Gramps and replace them with shared events. However, until this is done I would suggest using “Wife Age” and “Husband Age”.

@GeorgeWilmes

Question #2: My proposed attributes show up nicely in the “Complete Individual Report”, for example. But they don’t show up in the Attibutes gramplet in either the People category or Events category views. This is understandable, since they are not person attributes or event attributes, but rather person+event attributes. Is there another way to view or search for them?

We refer to person+event attributes as event reference attributes. I wrote a census gramplet to display these values, but I can’t remember if I made it public.

@GeorgeWilmes

Question #3: I think it would be most useful if I could have the Reported Age attribute appear as a column next to the (calculated) Age column in the Events gramplet. I’m not ready to code my own gramplet, but I suppose one solution would be to clone the Events gramplet and add a column. A more general solution might be to enhance the Events gramplet to allow the user to select additional columns (i.e. person+event attributes). Or possibly another solution would be to expose person+event attributes in other ways (separate gramplets, filters, etc.). Do any of those ideas make sense?

I would suggest using the pre-defined “Age” attribute rater than “Reported Age”.

Yes, these are good ideas.

[Mattkmmr]

@Nick-Hall

We refer to person+event attributes as event reference attributes

It seems that gramps is also lacking in filter rules for that.

[PLegoux]

@GeorgeWilmes

Question #1: What are the implications of tying a marriage event to the groom and bride in addition to the family, apart from seeing it appear twice when looking at a person’s events? I would only do this in cases where I want to attach a Reported Age, which I would do only when the age was significantly different (say, more than +/- 2 years) from the expected age based on their birth date.

You could just add an Age attribute to the birth event record of the person including marriage source citation into this attribute. No need to share marriage event with bride and groom in that way.