Question

Are births and deaths modeled as events for a person in a genealogy profile or as attributes of the person. What are the pros and cons of each approach?

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Solution

if you consider that every event has artifacts to go with it, they really should be events, so you can have all of the documents, etc. associated with them.

on the other hand, can you imagine a person record that doesn't have birth/death dates as attributes? you wouldn't want to have to do a join with the events that give you birth/death just so you could sort by those dates.

so there are the pros and cons, but there's also the idea you can have both. if you are willing to live with a database that isn't completely normalized, you can have them as events and for each person with birth/death events, copy those values into the attributes.

keep in mind, of course, that you could have multiple birth/death events for a person, records that might be in conflict, in which case only one of them that the user has indicated is meant to be the person's birth/date attribute would be copied.

OTHER TIPS

"Events" in genealogy (and in genealogy software) are generally considered something that takes place at a given time and place. They can be events for an individual, e.g. Birth, death, baptism, naturalization, emigration, etc., or for a family (husband/wife), e.g. Marriage, Engagement, Divorce.

"Attributes" (or "facts") are generally considered to be something that is true, e.g. Scholastic achievement,Tribal Origin, Occupation, Religious Affiliation, Title.

These are how GEDCOM defines them and how they try to get programmers to program them.

Personally, my concept of an "event' is a transition in a change of state. e.g. Going from before someone was born until once they are alive. It need not be a short period of time, but may take a long time, e.g. World War II was an event. And events can contain other events (e.g. the specific battles in World War II).

One more example is hair color, which is considered an attribute. But someone can be born with blond hair, have it fall out and replaced with brown hair, and then as they get older it turns grey before falling out again. Hair color are attributes that are true over a certain time, and are "fuzzy" as the event happens that changes it from one to another.

My concept of an "attribute" is that they have time periods to them. The attribute is the state which can be changed by events. e.g. "Occupation" changes with the "getting fired" event and "Unemployed" takes over until the "getting hired" event occurs.

So attributes are between events, and events separate different attributes.

What I am basically saying is that in my genealogy program, I really don't make a distinction between events and attributes. I treat them the same. Either may include a date or time period and events usually include a place and attributes usually don't.

Because of their similarities, I don't see any need to model them separately.

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