Unknown Burial Dates

Often you can find and record the date and place of death.  It's not so easy to determine the date of burial.  The name and place of the cemetery is also often available and should be entered in the burial field. Missing, in many cases, is the date of burial. It's possible to extrapolate the month and year of burial from the death information.

This situation creates a problem with RootsMagic.  When I record only the month and year of burial the program doesn't handle the burial date in chronological order in the detailed reports.  That is to say, the burial information is inserted into the "text" of the report before the death information.

There is a solution to the problem.  It's somewhat tedious to deal with this issue. RootsMagic has a "Sort date" field.  To force the burial date to appear after the death date I need to enter a full date in the "Sort date" field. For example, if a person died on 15 Dec 1969 I would enter this date in the death date field.  In the burial date field I would enter, Dec 1969. In the "sort date" field for burial date I would enter, 30 Dec 1969, thus forcing the burial date to sort after the death date.

Did I write about this before?  If I did, I suppose it indicates that my memory isn't very good and that this little problem drives me nuts.

Dick Henthorn
13 September 2014