Changes to the "Search People with Attached Photos or Marker Transcriptions" made 21 October 2022
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These searches have held up fairly well in the year and a half since I created them but I did notice one annoying thing and I fixed it today. I will explain the fix and the ramifications of it.
These changes only apply to the searches for missing birth years and missing death years (one set for the attached marker photos and one set for the attached marker transcriptions).
There were three problems with the searches, one was that they were picking up attached photos when the attached photo was not of a marker for a person, but rather an empty grave space flanked by adjoining markers. The second problem was that I had photos attached for people who shared a niche with other people, in some cases the marker shows the names of some of the people in the niche but not all of them. In these cases I treat the people whose names are missing from the marker as having "no marker" just like the people who have grass over their graves. Yes, they have markers, but if their name is not on the marker, they might as well not have a marker.
The third problem is that there are markers which have names and no dates. I had run across this so long ago I had added a hidden field to the database that is named "NoDateMarker". I populate this field with a "Yes" value when I know there is a marker that has a name or names on it but no dates (or a set of dates for one person but not another person on the same marker).
Since I have now "outed" that field I probably need to add it to the display of the people records. It will seem redundant there because if you are looking at a people record with an attached marker photo or marker transcription, it will be obvious there is missing data. Displaying the field will just make it explicit that the missing data has been noted within the database.
Those two sets of fields, the marker/no marker fields, and the "no dates on marker" field, are the basis of the changes I just made to these searches. The point of the searches is to find people where there is information on the attached marker photos or transcriptions that is not in the people record. Since I can't get dates off of a marker if the dates just aren't there, and I can't get dates off of a marker that has an attached photo of empty grass, I rewrote those queries looking for the missing birth years or death years to exclude two sets of records:
People with "no marker" photos attached to their records, and
People with markers that don't show birth and death years or dates
Note that I have a few attached photos that show birth years but no death years, which in many cases mean the marker is a cenotaph as the person is not actually buried there. Much more commonly, I have many markers attached which show death dates but no birth dates. In some cases these are children or stillborn infants for whom the birth and death dates are the same.
For now the "no dates" designation means "no dates of any kind". I could of course add additional fields for markers missing birth dates only and markers missing death dates only. For now that seems like overkill, but I could change my mind in the future.
Anyway, that's why the changes were made. I want the searches to find people with attached photos or transcriptions where there is data on the attachments that can be used to update the people records. Having the searches return results where there is nothing useable to update the records with is self-defeating and contradicts the reasoning for why I created the searches in the first place.
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