From: Jim Lesser <>
Subject: [TMG-L:] Re: SV: TMG-L: Living Flag
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 16:47:50 -0400
In-Reply-To: <005e01bfb164$40c71ca0$36d2d9c1@armada>
To All:
I've been struggling with this filter for a number of days. The filtered
group has lots of people who are still alive, as Jo-Maree said. I tried her
solution, but still got lots of living people, some born last year. I
produced a number of other filters using dates, such as those married
between one year and another with the same inconsistent results. When I
looked at the inconsistent records, I figured out the problem. If there is
no date for the event (even if there is a sort date), the person passes
through the filter. So, when there is no date, it is not treated as if it
were 00/00/00. This makes filtering events without dates useless if one
wants to do batch flag changes on the filtered dataset.
Could someone with more experience than I please comment on this apparently
problem?
Regards,
Jim Lesser
At 12:49 AM 4/29/2000 +0200, you wrote:
>-----Original message-----
>From: Jo-Maree Courtney <>
>To: '' <>
>Date: 28. apr 2000 17:54
>Subject: Re: TMG-L: Living Flag
>
> >their ancestors. I can't really see where this could go wrong. My current
> >theory is that it has something to do with undated tags. Does anyone know
> >how there would be treated by such a filter?
>
>
>Hi Jo-Maree C.
>
>I am fairly new to TMG, but it is my experience that undated tags (and also
>irregular dates) will have a date less than _any_ given date, exact or not.
>I suspect an undated tag to be represented as something like 00/00/0000. I
>try to minimize the problem by supplying date estimates where applicable
>(with surety value of 0). If I know two person were married in 1900, but do
>not know when they were born, I put 'before 1885' as the date of birth
>(unless I suspect the person to be married before age of 15 <g>). Note that
>the estimated date 'before 1885' will not be sorted before, for example, the
>year 1884, which in turn means that if you focus on dates before (less than)
>1884, this person will not be selected. In fact, this is much the same
>problem as pointed out in an earlier discussion on this list, on sorting of
>dates given as before/after a year (internally represented as 00/00/yyyy).
>One should therefore try to be as specific as possible in date estimates,
>and perhaps my date estimate should have been between 1830 and 1885.
>
>By the way: It is my opinion that one should always enter a date estimate
>where applicable. As far as I can see, there can be no more specific way of
>telling a computer whether to include a person in a set or not when
>searching on event dates. In that respect, any regular date statement that
>is consistent with your data (and beliefs such as marrying after age 15)
>will be better than no date statement at all. Looking at the output in
>reports might give another conclusion though. Fore some reports this can be
>fixed by modifying the specific tags sentence. It must be said though, that
>I use TMG more as a database and research tool than as a report generator
>(_not_ said that this is the only correct way of using TMG).
>
>
>A suggestion for future versions of TMG:
>I believe it would have helped some if one was offered a selection for
>various treatments of such tags together with the focus, e.g: (date-A/-B are
>user supplied dates)
>
>"Do not consider undated tags"
>"Always treat undated tags as less than date-A/all dates"
>"Always treat undated tags as greater than date-A/all dates"
>"Always treat undated tags as given inside/outside the range date-A to
>date-B"
>
>Depending on what you searched for, each one of these alternatives would
>give you the opportunity to include or exclude undated tags. In current
>version of TMG we are offered only the variant "Always treat undated tags as
>less than all dates". And maybe one should also be offered the same set of
>treatments for irregular dates.
>
>This comment was much too long 8)
>
>Regards,
>Frode Langset
>
>
>
>
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Jim Lesser248/626-2636
West Bloomfield, MI
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