suggestion for dead children

Question

If there could be a field for died in childhood this could help in a few ways. Dead children wouldn't require first names or genders in the error checking. Also it would keep us from merging with children born later with the same name of perhaps a second mother.  There is not necessarily a death date known or entered to indicate this person died in childhood. They would also not be a candidate when looking for a spouse.

Comments

Thanks Bea for sharing this image and Steve Mix for creating it.  This is just what I needed for several profiles.  Enjoyed this conversation very much.  Thanks everyone.

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It is not quite as easy as hovering, but clicking on "Descendants" will give you all the birth and death dates (but doesn't clarify "which mother" if there were multiple wives).

Clicking on "Family Group Sheet" will give birth and death, AND show you which children go with which parents.

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Thank you Connie enjoyed it as well :) So yes thanks everyone for responding and Sue of course for starting this G2G !

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And yes Janet, of course some clicking we will need to do to propose merges or check things anyway, but well, if there are a lot of them, hovering is just a little bit easier and prevents having to click again ..and perhaps again.. and again..and again the same ones.. because you're not sure if you did look and have the correct one or not :P

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The point about the category being large, why would this be a problem? Actually it would be interesting to see how many are there. The question of the purpose has been explained earlier. In short the purpose is to make them more visible for checking. Putting in no children, no spouse is a step in this direction and I have started doing this. I haven't entered some infants because they don't have a name and I don't want to generate the error of using infant or child or some other description. Also Unknown is ambiguous and we have enough of those. I put 'find a grave' for one on the mother's profile, but this will generate an error too now.

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Hi Sue

There are existing categories:

Category: Infant Mortality https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Infant_Mortality and
Category: Child Mortality
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Child_Mortality

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The sticker Died Young -- see Template: Died Young is intended to visually identify children who died young, both to memorialize them and to reduce the chance that they will be confused with others of the same name.

To add the sticker to a profile, insert {{Died Young}} below the Biography heading.

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This is a great conversation, thank you!

It is very common on my mother's English side, for the family to reuse names when one child dies, the next of the same gender gets the recycled name. Seems weird by our standards today, but very common, even in the U.S. not that long ago.

I haven't had the issue of abrupt merges on this case, though I have in others, so I could easily see this happening.

I like the Died Young sticker and didn't know it existed, so thank you for sharing that!

For unnamed infants, I use the standard convention of "Unknown" rather than "Infant." I believe "Infant" will result in a Suggestion (a.k.a db error) to fix it.

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Thanks for that sticker Ellen. I have applied it to every single one of the hundreds of profiles that use my image of "a child who passed."

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Thanks for the sticker, I have been using it as I find children who died.

Answer 1

I've been fixing such profiles to show "no children" and "no spouse." Does this actually remove them from spouse- or parent-searches? Would it block an unconsidered merge long enough for someone to note the date of death?

Comments

I was thinking along the same lines.  It seems that the children check box is information only.  It would be nice to remove the ability to add children when the no more children box is checked.

I have seen other places where there is a No children or Never Married as a status as well. If you have to remove a check in order to perform a particular task, IMO, it would be motivation to look a little closer.

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I hadn't realized that that no-more-children check box wouldn't have to be unchecked before you could add more children, but I can't honestly say I'm surprised - disappointed, but not surprised.

It would be nice, if someone changed that.

Answer 2

In the case of children born in England and Wales between 1837 and 1917, try searching the GRO:

https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexes_search.asp

using a surname, gender and mother's maiden name from the year of marriage onwards (leave the first/second name boxes empty). Select a date and +/- 2 years, then try again with a date 3 years younger. Repeat the +3 years step for the whole period you are interested in. Start with males then do females or vice versa. I have found most dead children from the 1911 census this way.

Comments

Thanks (and to Vivian).  This let me find a previously missing, un-named, g-aunt.

Answer 3

Merging with children of the same name is a big no-no. I've seen profiles where there were several children with the same name. Most usually had a birth record, and some had a death record as well. Even without records, just merging, especially with different mothers, should not be done. Just list each one with no children and no spouse.