I added some residence events, to record the addresses. Since I’m not sure about the years, I set the date range as “estimated”. I only entered the years, no months or days. Then I noticed really inconsistent output in the age column. I tried it with the example database / family tree and it seems to be reproducible.
The person has a birth event for April 4th 1984. I added a residence event as regular range 1994 to 1999. The age column in the events window of the person now shows “between 10 years and 16 years”. Now I change the event’s date type to “estimated” and the age column now shows “(between 40 years and 66 years)”.
I’ve seen all kinds of output there, even “between 64 and 50 years” as well as numbers clearly higher than the person is old. This seems like a bug to me. I’m not sure how to install the current master branch from git on my Windows machine. Maybe someone can check if this is still a problem in the current version. If it’s reproducible in the current version, it seems to warrant a bug report.
The “Estimated” term that you added to that “between” 6 year date span will pad the interpretted time spans with the ±years value preset in the Dates Preferences.
A “between” date span is already implicitly an estimation. As is a “year date” that omits the month… or a month that omits the day. So explicitly adding an “estimated” is doubly redundant.
Instead of: est bet 1994 and 1999
use: calc from 1994 to 1999
or (with slightly more uncertainty) calc between 1994 and 1999
The only odd thing is that the age extrapolation is being baffled by a negative age. (10-years-old minus the “estimated” 50-years is being misinterpreted as an absolute value of the negative 40 years old.)
Ok, so I got mixed up with “date span” and “date range”. In German it is not clear to me which is which. In English it’s a little better. I was trying to enter a time period, not a really uncertain single date. So I guess “span” is correct.
I’m not sure about “calculated” vs “estimated”. In this case it really is an estimation. I’m roughly sure about the years, give or take a year. I changed the three “date about” preferences from 50 to 5 years. The output makes a little more sense now, except when it’s close to the person’s birth. Maybe I’ll lower this even further. The default values seem very strange. If I know someone married roughly in the year 1900, why would I treat it as if he married between 1850 and 1950?! That is what’s happening here, right?
Anyway, thanks for the explanation and the pointers to the relevant documentation!
Something else to be aware of concerning about, before, and after.
You have encountered what these terms do for age calculations. They also have an affect on filter searches by dates. Based upon the default of 50 years, a search for all births in 1900, a date “after 1850” or “before 1950” will also return as results for 1900.
Obviously, altering the date preferences will affect these ranges in filters as well.