Cemetery Place Name and Burial Date Issues

Burial Date Issue

Sometimes it's possible to determine the full date of burial from an obituary.  More often than not the cemetery name is found in the obituary but not the burial date.  My current genealogy program, RootsMagic5, has a field for storing information about the place and date of burial.

The way RootsMagic5 handles the burial date is driving me a little crazy.  I don't understand why the program doesn't assume that "burial" always follows "death" whenever the burial date I enter is incomplete.  In any narrative report I always want the death information to print out before the burial information.

There's a way to fix the problem, but it's very tedious.  There is a "Sort Date" field in which you can insert a date to control the order in which "events" display  So far, it seems to me, to be best to enter a date near the end of the month into the "Sort Date" field whenever I don't know the full date of burial. I use the 28th for February burials and the 30th for all of the other months.

If anyone else has dealt with this issue and can add to my understanding feel free to add your comments to this post.

Place Name Issue

It's my practice to record the burial place names in this manner.

Woodsfield, Monroe Co., OH, Pioneer Cemetery

I enter the cemetery name as the last item of place name information, rather than the first item.  I do this because I want all events that took place in a particular town or city to be grouped together in any sorted list of place name information.

Dick Henthorn
16 September 2013