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→How does Gramps determine if someone is alive?: new location
A simple way to tell if someone is alive is to see if they have a death event, or a death-related event (such as a burial). However, it is probably true that many people in your database don't have such events, as you may not know any details of their death. If you know someone is dead, it might be a good idea to create a death event. You can also go back and add useful details (such as date and place of death) once that is known. Adding events for people known dead, even if they contain no exact details, is somewhat useful. However, Gramps can also add events with estimated dates (or not) for you (described below).
Requiring a user to manually add a death event to a person (so that they would not be considered alive) would be very tedious ---one would have to enter details on many people. Recall that if someone is considered alive, then their details should be prevented from being shared when exported. Therefore, Gramps has a function that can compute whether someone is probably alive based on their event dates, or their relations with people who may have event dates. For example, if a person doesn't have any evidence of death (such as a death or burial event), then Gramps will check this person's parents, children, siblings, continuously until some evidence is found---or it runs out of connections to check. Using information on typical age and event spans (such as typical age differences among siblings, typical ages of mothers at time of birth, etc.) Gramps can make guesses as to whether a person is alive or dead. As you can imagine, this can be a time-expensive function to execute, but can be quite useful. The values for the typical ages at birth, between generations, etc., can be set in the {{man menu|Menu -> Edit -> Preferences -> [[Gramps_5.2_Wiki_Manual_-_Settings#DatesLimits|DatesLimits > Calculation limits]]}}tab.
The probably alive function can check to see if a person was alive on any specific date, or during a time span. This is used in the [[Gramps_5.2_Wiki_Manual_-_Gramplets#Age_on_Date|Age on Date]] Gramplet. Normally, the system will estimate birth and death events, and see if a date falls between those two.
