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

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