I've been using your site for years for my family tree information. One suggestion I would like to make is that you add two fields under the place of burial. One would be a field to allow entry of information other than a place of burial, such as cremation or loss of remains. The other would be a field that would allow the profile manager to enter the find-a-grave website listing number for their grave site memorial. This would be extremely helpful to others looking for final disposition information on their family members.
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4 comments
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Bjørn P. Brox I don't think we should add more items to the basic input field since this should be a site for the whole world and all religions, and, not for your example, but for others people might feel insulted if we get fields for events that is for a specific religion only.
You already have multiple ways to manually add extra information, - the most recommended way if you want to present facts for the family is to use the About Me field where you can tell the story about the person with nice formatting, links and additional photos instead of just having fields with dry facts.
If you want to be more systematic you should take a look in the Timeline tab of a profile where you have the option to add extra events that is not covered by the basic fields, like cremation, bar and bat mitzvah, confirmation etc. If you click on an entry in the timeline you get to a more detailed page where you can tell the story, edit facts, adding photos, videos, documents and sources for the event. You can also add additional people to the event making the event to show up on their profile as well.You also have the discussion tab where you can start a discussion about a profile if you want help from others to make decisions, ask for documentation etc, or simply state personal facts about the profile you want others to see.
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Edwin Eddie Thomas Scott, Jr. I appreciate your comments Bjorn, but my requests had nothing to do with religion. The choice of disposal can be influence by a person's religion or culture but it is not dependent on that. Often is a choice of personal desires or of simple finances. Poor people are increasingly opting for cremation for strictly financial reasons since it is less expensive than a traditional burial.. If it were the case that cremation of other disposition was somehow tied to someone's religious beliefs, then wouldn't some cultures/religions be equally offended by the idea of stating their relatives were buried and where they were buried, as opposed to burial or other disposition of the body? My request considered that in the basic input fields on the profile and edit profile sections the only choice a person had was to include a date and place of burial or to not do so, and to do as you suggested go to extra steps to record that data somewhere else in a comment rather than a basic input field. This is problematic because some users are only basic users whose primary use of the service is the family tree function. For those users they rarely delve deeper into profiles than the basic input and edit profile screens and currently they are locked into date and place of burial as the only options if they chose to not go deeper into the profile and do further editing. It is also problematic because there are lots of instances in which the disposition of the body is unknown or the remains are missing and it would be helpful to be able to have that information up front rather than burial information. As for the Find-A-Grave listing I know that could also be buried deeper in the profile, but I thought it would be more appreciated up front with the basic information where the person could find it more easily and especially when they want to search both the family tree and the Find-A-Grave listings simultaneously across multiple members of their family tree. Burying it deeper in the profile would mean they would not be able to keep the tree portion open and just open profile edit fields to quickly grab the Find-A-Grave listing number and open a new tab to that listing and others. If they have to click the actual profile and search through it for the info then go to the listing, they have to close that profile and go back to the tree and the process back and forth would be exhaustive and cumbersome. My suggestions were simply a matter of convenience, not a religious statement. I assumed that the website's architecture is based on a standard database format where adding fields would be a simple matter for it's administrators. At any rate they were simply suggestions I requested and I hope they were not offensive.
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Dan Cornett re: Find-A-Grave links
An interesting possibility ... if it were a generic link. BillionGraves is the other obvious alternative, and there are a lot of smaller web-sites which have similar collections. So, if there were to be an additional field associated with the "burial" fields (perhaps could be thought of as "post-death event of significance" ?), it should, I think, accommodate a generic 'link'.
The non-burial information can, in my view, be put into the 'place' of burial field; that is a common practice on sites such as Find-A-Grave. I think using the existing "place" portion of the "post-death event's location" can be useful.
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Jodie Reynolds Interestingly, I came across a forum from Geni from 2011 (probably 1 of many others I daresay) requesting a cremation option also. I thought it would have been standard to have a cremation and burial field like most other family builder sites, and thought it would have been done by now, since it's a very common thing these days and will only become more common in future due to space limitations, among other things. I feel listing dates/info in the burial spaces isn't an accurate representation of the events/person (& maybe confusing for others who view it) when a person wasn't buried at all.
I doubt having the option for a cremation field would offend anyone though, as people do not have to fill it in if they prefer burials.
As for linking Find-a-grave, one can add links (URLs) as sources then tick the boxes citing the info it backs up, which will have it then show up in that persons' profile.
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