* Compare birth year with a year value in a note

[ericmjones]

I have a birth entries of the form:
Birth
Date Q2 1901
Note GRO: Aylesbury 3a, 567 1901 Jun Q Mother: Jones
As initially the birth years came from census entries etc,. and I looked for the birth record in The GRO there are cases where the years differ. Is it possible to compare the birth year with the year extracted from the GRO reference in the note?

[tatewise]

It would be relatively easy with a custom Plugin, but you will have to learn how to write Lua scripts.

With a Query, the tricky process is extracting the year digits from the Note GRO entry.
There are new functions in FH V7 that could probably do that, but not in FH V6 that you are still uisng.

[dbnut]

I have a birth entries of the form:
Birth
Date Q2 1901
Note GRO: Aylesbury 3a, 567 1901 Jun Q Mother: Jones
As initially the birth years came from census entries etc,. and I looked for the birth record in The GRO there are cases where the years differ. Is it possible to compare the birth year with the year extracted from the GRO reference in the note?

As a matter of course, any birth years I enter from sources noting only age, such as censuses, are like "c 1812" (which usually shows then as "1812 (app)".

Later, a GRO index entry (for a quarter) tells only the 3-month span in which birth was *registered*. So, firstly, we need a way to refine the approximation and secondly, keep reminding ourselves the birth itself could have been 6 weeks earlier than the start of that reporting quarter (and in exceptional cases earlier still, even *much* earlier than that).

One approach is to change the birth date to "c Q1 1812" or whatever. A perfectly legal date format. That's a start, as long as we remind ourselves.... blah.

The only snag I found is that Family Historian seems to treat that in date calculations as the first day of the first month in that quarter (reasonable, but I may be wrong - anyone?). I abandoned that approach and now enter "c Feb 1812" (probably treated as the first day of that mid-quarter month).

Silly distinction, perhaps, but it's a kind-of "best estimate" of the actual (unknown) *birth* date, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 2 months in the vast majority of cases.

So, I don't ever need to attempt the comparison you are hoping to do. On finding the GRO registration, I just *replace* any earlier year-precision birth date with a somewhat better estimate.

And the year part *will* change in about three out of four cases from estimates based on census age reported around 1st April. Actually, a generally better guess in 3 out of 4 cases is one year *before* the census-based approximation.

[Funnily enough, a common mistake in reported census ages is to simply subtract the (usually well-remembered) birth year from the current year. Then the implied birth year is spot-on!]

Naturally, later you can replace the approximation by the actual birth date from a GRO certificate (and record an exact registration date too, if you feel like it). Or you may find that from a later-era death registration. Or the 1939 England & Wales Register (which is occasionally wrong, as all reports are, including census ages).

[ericmjones]

It would be relatively easy with a custom Plugin, but you will have to learn how to write Lua scripts.

With a Query, the tricky process is extracting the year digits from the Note GRO entry.
There are new functions in FH V7 that could probably do that, but not in FH V6 that you are still uisng.

I am using V7

[ericmjones]

@dbnut ~ Thanks for the thoughts. It will take me a while to think them through.

[tatewise]

Eric, we would know you were using FH V7 if your Profile on the right of your posting said so instead of FH V6.
Please click your username, navigate to Edit profile, select Family Historian V7, then scroll down to SUBMIT.

The FH V7 functions that could extract the year digits from your Note GRO entries are summarised below but rely on those entries being entirely consistent:
=GetLabelledText( %INDI.BIRT.NOTE2%, "Note GRO:" ) retrieves the GRO entry text
=Section( GetLabelledText(...), 4, " " ) uses the function above, splits the entry into space-separated sections and returns the 4th section, which should be the year digits if your format is always: District Vol Page Year Month...

=TextToNumber( Section(...) ) uses the function above and converts the year digits to a number.

=Year( %INDI.BIRT.DATE% ) provides the year number from the date to compare with the number above.

[ericmjones]

Thanks Mike - I will have a go at it. Apologises for the version error - I never noticed it.