Setting a LIVING/DEAD flag

[Keith Wilson]

Originally posted by Chris Knight

Keith,
As you might remember I use TNG for my website. A lot of ancient ancestors show up as " Living" on my site, I think that is because iFamily has not marked them dead. This is presumably because they have no dates for birth or death in the relevant entries.

What would be great if possible is for iFamily to set a " Dead" flag if the Gedcom standard allows this, based on a simple calculation like " If any descendants of Person are 80 years old, assume Person is dead" or similarly, " If any parent of Person is 140 years old, assume Person is dead"

This would then reset all the living flags on my site which are a pain for people who have not registered to see living people because they are only interested in some long dead rellies.

I could do it by hand on my site but then I think a new iFamily gedcom would change them back- besides which it would take far too long!

Chris

[Keith Wilson]

Hi Chris

In iFamily you can enter Y for a death date to indicate that a person is dead. The person is then treated as " not living" when exported to a Gedcom file. The Gedcom DEAT record is also set to a value of Y as per the gedcom 5.5 specification. When reading a Gedcom file iFamily will correctly interpret a DEAT record that has a value of Y.

The iFamily rules for determining if a person is dead is similar to what you have asked for -

IF(deathYear OR
(deathDate = " Y" ) OR
((no deathDate) AND (birthYear exists) AND (birthYear currentYear - 100)))
THEN
person is " not living"
ELSE
person is " living"

We could make the calculation more complex but decided to leave it up to the user to either (a) enter an approximate (about) date or (b) enter a Y, for the death date

Keith

[Keith Wilson]

Originally posted by Chris Knight

Keith,
Many thanks, this will save a lot of pain in future!

Chris