Great work, Richard!
Sarah,
In projects I've worked on in the past, I came to the conclusion that dates needed to have a field each for year, month & day, especially when the dates could range from contemporary to prehistoric (and earliest and latest so approximate dates could be used rather than leaving out uncertain information). It worked - and the data has been exchanged or re-used.
When setting up the database for the Parks & Gardens UK biographical information, we included fields for alternative names to allow for married names, inherited titles, nicknames (a bit of a thing with historical horticultural folk) etc. It was particularly important when recording families where the same first name was used liberally so, for example, not only fathers and sons shared it but also cousins, occasionally brothers - and they often lived in the same town, sometimes the same house, and had the same type of occupation. We had different rules for living people.
I know I don't want my exact date of birth or place I live to be displayed in catalogues online - although I would, of course, be happy for those to be displayed after I've died. I assume other people would have the same preference. Since my first and last names are common, I feel the need at times for a personal URI & mechanism by which more detailed information can be added to databases after my death and not all immediately after.
Janet
Janet E Davis
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