On 2011-05-13 12:08, Richard Smith wrote: > On May 13, 8:11 am, "Peter J. Seymour"<[email protected]> > wrote: > >> That is why in the Gendatam system an event can be standalone or linked >> to any number of people and/or evidence records and can have any number >> of dates. > > Thanks for pointing out the Gendatam data model. That's a new one on > me, and I'll definitely spend some time over the weekend reading up on > it. > >> It is however in my experience rare for an event to be >> assigned more than one possible date. > > I think it depends a bit on how you use it. Lots of sources -- > censuses, gravestones, marriage certificates to give a few examples -- > give the age of a person which allows you to infer the date of birth > to within a year. But it's not uncommon, in my experience at least, > for these ages to be wrong. Often it's unlikely that I'll find a > precise date of birth, but it's convenient if programs can display an > approximate date -- for example, so I can easily distinguish in a list > of names between John Smith (b c1650) and John Smith (b c1800). Most > software doesn't seem to do this automatically, so it's sometimes > worth adding birth events for them. But if you do, then you have to > deal with incompatible data. > > In the case of a birth, we know that a person is only born once ..... > > Richard Quite so. The other tricky one is absence of data such as failure to find a date at all when you have a name for someone. (My most common hurdle). Peter