"Richard Smith" <richard@ex-parrot.com> wrote in message news:anifgqFg3muU1@mid.individual.net... > I've been considering how to record civil registration of births and > deaths in my own genealogy database. Currently, if I discover a birth > registration in, say, Q1 1867, then I enter a birth event for Jan-Mar 1867 > and a source citation to the UK GRO index (or to FreeBMD sa appropriate). > However, this is wrong as the person could have been born in late Dec 1866 > and the birth registered (perfectly properly) a week or two later, as > happened with my great grandmother. And it's certainly possible that the > birth was earlier still and registered late -- just because (in the UK) > there was a legal requirement to register births within 42 days doesn't > mean it necessarily always happened like that. > > But I'm now thinking that I should consider 'birth registration' to be a > separate event to 'birth', much as I consider 'baptism' to be separate to > 'birth'. I can then say, quite correctly, that the birth registration > occurred in Jan-Mar 1867, and I can use this to estimate a birth in Nov > 1866 - Mar 1867. This also allows the 'birth registration' event to have > different participants to the 'birth' event. For example, a birth > registration (in the UK, at least) has an informant who is often but not > always a parent. > > However, I'm surprised that (so far as I can tell) none of the usual > genealogical data models seem to allow for this. So how do other people > record civil registrations? Or am I unusual in having quite a few people > in my tree (generally cousins N-times removed) where the registration > quarter is my best estimate of their date of birth or death? > > Richard Yes, I have seen a lot of people record, say, 1867 Q1, taken directly from FreeBMD, as a date-of-birth rather than a date-of-registration. However, it's only a coarse date-of-registration at that (to a granularity of a yearly quarter) since it's taken from the GRO index -- the real date of registration would be on the certificate. I can't believe that "usual models" don't accommodate this. Certainly my own model (STEMMA) makes the distinction and has event-types for each. I thought it was taken for granted that there are birth-related events (e.g. birth, registration, baptism), marriage-related events (e.g. civil, religious, banns), and death-related events (e.g. death, registration, burial). Probably the most common issue that I come across is burial dates recorded as date-of-death, and this seems to be the product of local transcriptions (say from a FHS) not clearly making the distinction. Tony Proctor