To modify the date of an event you use the "Edit events and facts" dialog window.
GEDKeeper supports the following date subtypes:
Dates can be incomplete, i.e. one or more parts of date may be skipped. That is, to the extent that you can define only day number, month only, or year only. Of course, you can combine these parts.
For a date entered you can specify type of calendar and where the date is calculated. GEDKeeper supports Gregorian, Julian, Jewish (Hebrew), French, and Roman calendars. You can also specify a date as a date of Anno Domini period (BC is off) or a date of Before Christ period (BC is on). In order to convert dates of two different calendars you have to use the "Calendar" plugin.
There are three operations in the program to handle dates: storing, showing, and processing. Each operation has its own specific purpose and that is why all these operations were separated from each other. These purposes are:
When GEDKeeper shows an incomplete date it replaces unknown parts with the underscore ("_") symbol. Some users argued against it, but such symbols allow to clearly show what parts of a date are missed. This also guarantees a unified presentation of all dates throughout the program.
Incomplete dates are also allowed in filters on persons for birthdays and obits. Therefore, it is possible to select all people born between 1700 and 1710, without specifying days and months.
To understand specific processing of dates and events, it is necessary to introduce both the topicsas they are handled in the program. A date of an event is just a combination of known day, month, and year within the bounds of some calendar. A date may be empty or incomplete, exact, relative, or be a range. A date does not bear any other (non-calendar) information. An event is a record about certain occurrences which happened in a person's life. Such a record includes type of event, date, place, description, and additional information. A person entry, for example, can have a record about death with an empty date. This means that person died but no one knows when. Therefore, GEDKeeper processes differently persons with records about death and persons without such a record.
Some other software programs do not handle death and birth events like GEDKeeper does. They usually use a "Died" flag and fields that store date and place of death. From the point of view of GEDKeeper all events are the same. Therefore, GEDKeeper processes them the same way and never limits the number of stored events. For purposes of the next research, a single person record is able to store several death and birth events (thus allowing storing several versions). This makes GEDKeeper more flexible since you do not have to write such events into the text notes, or write birth and death events as a range of dates. Moreover, having such an approach allows you to attach sources of information to each event and, later, see all the sources. When a researcher gets reliable information you can delete an incorrect event or mark it as erroneous. The latter allows seeing that some information, even if erroneous, was rechecked and refuted.
Number of years in "Age" and "Life span" columns get calculated as follow:
To make processing of bulk data more easy (for example, for data taken from a censushaving many records without a specified obit) GEDKeeper offers a check database service (accessible from the "Service\Tools\Check database" menu). This service checks all person records and when it finds a record having no death event, with age exceeding the most well-known and scientifically approved limits of a human life, the service suggests an automatic fix for the death event (you must select a suggestion and click the "Fix" button). For GEDKeeper the limit of a human life is 122 years (see the "List of the verified oldest people" Wikipedia page). It should be noted that the checking function does not set an obit of a person to the maximum valueit just creates an empty death event as an indication.
See also: Event.