I use BEF with sources, and without sources (my source is "wild guess" until I find a real source).  Most common ways I use it: Parents have children, and perhaps I know the children birthdays from marriage or death records, or the tombstone.  I make assumptions that the father was 21 and mother was 18, and calculate a date of birth for parents as born BEF xxxx. I find a married man without his wife in the 1910 census.  I show her as died BEF 1910.  Next I go to the 1900 census and there she is.  So I change her to died BET 1900-1910. Using obituaries I'll put died BEF Sep xxxx or died AFT Sep xxxx, or usually just the year, not the month.  I don't normally put exact dates in unless there is something striking about it.  It may imply to me there are court records or a will, or a child died about that same time, or I'm trying to see how many months a person waited before re-marrying,   If I later find them with a child, a "wild guess" is that the marriage was after the date of death, and the year before the child was born, so I'll do a BET for the marriage. I usually share my information via Register Report rich text files.  I do a global find and replace for BEF, BET, AFT, CIR so people new to genealogy won't get confused.  Makes the report read better, too. Vicki From: J. P. Gilliver (John) via <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 6:47 PM Subject: [BK] How do you (discussion, not enquiry) express dates with the BEF(ore) tag? There are times when I know something happened before a date: I sometimes wonder how precise I should be with the date. For example, say someone is known, on a specific date, to be a widow(er): obviously, the DOD of the spouse is BEF(ore) that date. But do I say BEF ddmmyyyy? That's strictly _correct_, and on the whole is what I do, but some people seeing it might think it means they died quite close to it. I was just wondering how others express the date when they use BEEF. (Side idle thought: when the husband dies first, the wife is widowed, becoming a widow. When the wife dies first, the husband becomes a widower - so is he widowed, or widowered?) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)[email protected]+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law." - Winston Churchill. Remember - Use the Archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/search ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message