Record what you know about a life

Click a person on the tree or in the people list. Their story opens full screen on Life: the years as headlines, Edit facts, Add place of birth and the other missing details as invitations, How we know beneath each fact, then Add life event, the reviewed stories, and the memories and records about them.

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   Step 1. Choose Edit facts. Names, birth and death, places, occupation and a note each have their own field.

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   Step 2. Dates carry a precision. For each date, What is known? offers Year only, About a year, Before a year, After a year, Between two dates, Month and year or Exact day; missing parts stay unknown. A date shown as about 1890 stays that way in exports and printed chapters.

   

   

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   Step 3. Add what the record gives and no more: here, a death year for Eleanor.

   Watch: opening Edit facts, choosing Year only for the death date, entering 2009 and saving · 15s

   Silent demonstration. Follow the written steps on this page at your own pace.

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   Step 4. Life status is its own decision: living, recorded as deceased or unknown. Unknown is protected like living, so a viewer sees no details until an editor decides.

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   Step 5. Choose Save facts. Every change is listed in Activity, and the previous value is kept in the person’s history.

   

   

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Under the facts, Life events hold the moments of a life: a wedding, a move, a war, a first job. Each event can have a date or date range, a place, the people involved and the records that support it. Events become the chapters of a printed life and the stops a relative can be asked about.

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A maiden name, a nickname, a name in another script: under Other names in Edit facts, choose Add another way this name is written, then give its Kind, the Name as written and an optional language tag and note. Search and GEDCOM matching find the person under any of them; the display name stays as you recorded it.

Places keep the spelling you recorded. Where the recorded-places feature is enabled, a place page collects every mention across the family and lets you note today’s name beside the historical one; see places, names and languages.