FamilySearch/gedcomx — Issue #117: Multiple Birth/Death/Gender "Conclusions"
Author: EssyGreen
Created: 2012-02-05 10:54:31+00:00
State: open

My understanding of the Conclusion Model is that it will allow multiple births, deaths and gender (in a similar way to the existing GEDCOM 5.x). However, this is illogical for a "Conclusion" ... If we conclude that Person ABC was born at a certain date/place than we cannot possibly also *conclude* that they were born at a different date/place. We can conclude that a bundle of evidence suggests one or the other and we can prefer one or other of these evidence bundles but a person cannot possibly be born more than once! Similarly a Person cannot die more than once (although it may be possible for their heart to stop more than once) and can only have a single gender at birth) - I would recommend that trans-sexual events would be better dealt with as bespoke facts. Cremations are also single-events and the vast majority of burials would be singletons (although I accept that it is physically possible to be buried more than once.)

If we are to support multiple Births/Deaths/Genders etc in the Conclusion model then a better description would be a "Hypothesis" rather than "Conclusion". And a Hypothesis could include multiple generic facts (but only a single birth, death and gender) which form a specific scenario being tested out by the researcher.

Conversely, if the Conclusion Model is really intended to reflect Conclusions then it should not permit impossible situations and hence there need to be two types of fact: repeatable facts and non-repeatable facts (singletons within the Person).