Question Identification of twins

Currently twins are only identified when specific dates of birth are known (day, month & year) and these dates are the same or within 1 day of each other.

When only 'broader' dates are known, such as month & year or quarter (e.g. JAN-MAR) & year, then twin siblings are not identified.

Also, when date differences are shown on the families tab, the difference is calculated using the earliest possible date for one sibling and the latest possible date for the other sibling resulting in a difference that isn't possible.

The attached example shows twin brothers born in June 1923 but the day of birth isn't known.

 

Suggestion: When the numbers of days difference between the earliest day of birth (MinimumJulianDay) and latest day of birth (MaximunJulianDay) between siblings is less than 100 (or make this figure a preference), then identify these as twins.

 

I think it is not a good idea to identify twins (or triplets) automatically. Sometimes you can find two siblings who are born nearly at the same time ("less than 100 days"). And the reason is not that they are twins, the reason is that they belong to different families (with the same name) and you have an error in your tree. So for me, if there are two children with the same mother and the difference in their birth dates is between 2 and about 180 days this is a warning signal.

When I know for sure that two persons are twins I use ASSO (associated person) to connect the twins. If there are triplets I add two ASSO to each of the triplets to link them together. The type of association is then TRIPLETT.    

Ich habe das so verstanden, daß es nur um die Anzeige geht, wenn schon alles eingegeben ist:
nicht die Anzeige älterer Bruder, sondern Zwillingsbruder und ähnliches.

Außerdem gebt es da eh kein spezielles tag im gedcom dafür (soviel ich weiß), so dass man Zwilling eingeben könnte..

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I understood this to mean that it's only about the display when everything has already been entered:
not the older brother ad, but twin brother and the like.

Besides, there's no special tag for it in gedcom anyway (as far as I know), so you could enter twin..
 

The notion of "twins" etc is quite tricky, starting with what sort of twins! I suggest you tag things like that manually.

Genealogy is a messy process and prone to "interpretation". You have to decide how rigorous you are going to be in your research and how you are going to describe things and then how other people will interpret your data.

For example one of my gg aunts who ended up In Australia (we are mostly Brits) who dabbled in genealogy did a great job but felt she had to interpret several events to fit in with her world view. It took a while to unpick interpretations from verifiable facts.

"Twins" and so on is a decoration - you might as well notice blonde hair colour. Use tags/annecdotes to decorate your data.

gerdesj wrote:

"Twins" and so on is a decoration - you might as well notice blonde hair colour. Use tags/annecdotes to decorate your data.
 

It's more than a decoration.  If you know they are twins, when you (or a collaborator) discovers the birthdate of one of them, using ASSO as Hermann suggested allows quick update of both INDIs.