Awkward wording for dates in profiles

Question

On a profile that has a birth date entered, I just entered the death year and marked the status as "after" (based on the last year a record showed him as living).  Here's what the profile's view page looks like:

Died after 1929 after about age 71

It seems like a better way needs to be found to display this.

Comments

Does this profile have an exact birth date? Does it have about/uncertain checked for the birth?

That wording looks good to me if the birth date is uncertain. Do you have a better suggestion for the wording?

It is hard to get the wording right though. The England Project policy is that if you only have a burial date you should put the death date as "before" that date. So for example on this profile it says "Died before 29 Sep 1809 before age 0".

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Rob, you're correct - the birth date was only a year and marked "about or uncertain".  I understand that if you really look carefully at each word and its placement, it is technically correct, but "after about age 71" looks really strange and it doesn't help that the word "after" appears twice.

I'm not a qualified wordsmith, so I'm not the right person to come up with a cleaner way to say it.  Perhaps in the case of before and after dates, it would help to not attempt to report age at death.

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I agree this is clumsy, Gaile. Two alternative suggestions (you've already alluded to the second one):

• "Died after 1929 aged more than 70"
• Omit all mention of age in cases like this which are not clear-cut.

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OK Gaile, how about this.  We can express either a birth date or a death date in four possible ways:  exact [date], before [date], after [date], or about [date], so there are 16 possible combinations for which you're looking for wording.  (This looks fairly straightforward if you show it in a 4 x 4 table, but as a by-product of this exercise, we have determined that I'm incompetent at producing a table for G2G.)

For the case of exact birth and death dates, we can state "Died at age [exact]."  For the cases of 'exact' birth date and 'before' death date, or 'after' birth date and 'exact' death date, we can state "Died at age [#] or less".  For the cases of 'before' birth date and 'exact' death date, or 'exact' birth date and 'after' death date, we can state "Died at age [#] or greater".  And for the cases of 'exact' birth date and 'about' death date, or 'about' birth date and 'exact' death date, or 'about' birth date and 'about' death date, we can state "Died at about age [#]".  For the other eight possible combinations, we adopt your suggestion of not attempting to report age at death in prose.

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Dennis, THANX for adding the good analysis.  By the way, you're the farthest thing from incompetent - the culprit is G2G's limitations that need a workaround!  How about making a table in a word processor or spreadsheet, taking a screenshot and saving as jpg, then upload to a space page from which it can be put into G2G?

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Hmm, probably could do that, but sounds like way too much work for another going-nowhere idea.

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I have to agree that your "going-nowhere" assessment is at least 99% right on.

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In case people are interested, this is the post where this new feature was introduced: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1419742/did-you-notice-the-age-at-death-on-profiles?show=1419742#q1419742

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Just to note: the wording was updated after that announcement post to account for before and after dates. Dennis' suggestion about figuring out what the wording should be for each of the 16 combinations had already been done, and it was decided that showing an approximate age using accurate (although awkward) wording when possible was better than not showing anything at all.

"Died after 1929 aged more than 70" may not be accurate if there is an "about" in the dates.

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There does seem to be an error when the birth date is exact and the death date is before, see Wohlman-55
Born Mar 1841
Died before 29 Dec 1884 before age 43

She was about 43 and 9 months when she died so before 43 is incorrect in this case. So should it say "before age 44"?

Edit: Similarly for the "before age 0" I mentioned above. Is there an "off by one" math error somewhere?

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Before dates are tricky since in the England project we use them for baptism and burial dates. For burial dates in particular we know they died less than a few weeks before the burial date. But other uses of "before" could mean decades before.

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Thanks for pointing that out Rob, I'll take a look.