Family Historian User Group

Is it possible on the individual property box to have both the birth and death date shown for the individual's children? If so, any clues as to how I can do this?

The children's death date will / can appear on the Facts tab of the Individual's Property Box. See the second line here: Just in case it doesn't appear on yours, if you go to the cog-wheel configuration at the bottom of the facts and choose Timeline Facts thus: ... then you can choose BMD dates for immediate relatives on the resulting window: If you want the death dates to appear on other tabs, then I don't know if that's possible.

It is not possible to add Children's Death Dates on any other tabs of the Property Box.
However, they are shown in Children section of the Focus Window with the same person in focus.
i.e. Click the magnifying glass Display in Focus Window button in the Property Box toolbar.

However, try the Quick Family Facts plugin that shows all the key dates for a family group.
If it is added to the Tools Menu the Alt + T + Q shortcut displays the plugin very quickly.

Thanks Mike, Adrian.

Adrian, I have made the modifications as you describe.

Mike, I must admit I use the focus window hardly at all. I use, principally the Records winow, or the Ancestor and Descendant diagram. The reason behind my question is that just recently I have been working on a family where there are some quite confusing parish records, and when working on the family, seeing the death dates for the children would have saved time switching between tabs and provided a better synopsis of the family than the focus window.

I don't understand how the Property Box Main tab, even with the addition of Child Death Dates, gives a better synopsis of the family than the Focus Window.

The Focus Window shows 3 generations with birth/baptism/christening & death/burial/cremation dates for everyone, which is more than the Property Box shows, and the Property Box is on display too for a few other details such as Occupation.
The Focus Window also shows multiple Marriages and all the Children, which the Property Box does not as Spouses & Children are on separate tabs.

mezentia wrote: ↑

17 May 2021 14:56

I must admit I use the focus window hardly at all. I use, principally the Records winow, or the Ancestor and Descendant diagram.

Like you, I don't use the Focus window, but work with the Records window and Diagrams. The diagram displays the death and/or burial dates so it gives me the synopsis I need. Does that not work for you? I rarely need to look at the children's section of the main tab of the Property box at all. (My main working text scheme also includes occupations and census events/places, so it's quite a comprehensive synopsis.)

I think, Mike, that you may have answered your own question with your reply, in that the focus window actually displays too much information. I am not interested in occupations, or multiple generations, or even burial or cremation dates; I wish to focus on a single couple, their children and their dates of birth and death. To have the children's death dates listed alongside their birth dates on the parent's individual prperty window would provide a very simple and very concise synopsis of the family. The only item of information missing at present is the death dates for the children. I wholly agree with Lorna that this is visible on the diagram too, but with some large families this information is spread out over a large area of screen. One of the reasons for asking if the children's death date could be shown is because of the potential in this particular family for the use of necronyms, that is to say, names shared with dead siblings, and seeing both birth and death dates on the individual property screen helps in keeping track of who I am talking about as I try and analyse and re-construct the family. As I'm working well before civil registration here, on a family whose surname has innumerable different spellings and a quite small pool of first names this is as you will appreciate, not an easy task. Even more so when the fornames are abbreviated on the parish register entries, and there is some inconsistency of the use of full and abbreviated names, and not to mention apalling image quality on FindMyPast coupled with the atrocious writing of whoever complied the parish register at the time. And I thought my handwriting was bad ...

Anyway, I think a wish list request is in the pipeline.

What you are describing with the occupation and numerous dates sounds like the property box not the focus window. It seems like the focus window shows exactly what you are looking for, the couple, their children and all their birth and death dates.

Bill

I think Bill has illustrated my point perfectly. I said it is the Property Box that adds details such as Occupation.

If these searches relate to well before civil registration, then where are you getting Birth and Death dates from?
Usually, it is Baptism and Burial dates that parish records provide and only sometimes give Birth and Death dates.
The attraction of the Focus Window is that it shows the best of Birth/Baptism/Christening and Death/Burial/Cremation dates with a clear indication of which is which.

So be careful what you wish for, as a request for Death dates will provide just that.