Hansmartin Unger asked about the use of the symbols *, oo and + for birth,
marriage and death. All of them have Christian associations, which is why
many avoid them in Jewish genealogy.

In English descendant reports etc., the abbreviations "b.", "m." and "d."
are standard and don't take up much space, but Hansmartin may have been
thinking of a report in German, where one-letter abbreviations are not
available. As far as I know, there is no generally accepted alternative, but
I don't see any need for abbreviations or symbols.

Date of birth and date of death: A hyphen or dash between them is
sufficient. If one of the dates is unknown, "1921-" and "-1937" are still
unambiguous. I prefer "1921-?" and "?-1937", because this leaves the format
"1921-" for a person who is still alive.

Spouse: In a descendant report, I place spouses on a separate line, preceded
by an equals sign =. (I don't recall whether I've seen this elsewhere or
whether I based this on the double lines some people use for marriages in
tree diagrams.) Even that is not needed if you use the Henry numbering
system and append "a" for the spouse (or "b" etc. for subsequent marriages).

Date of marriage: One can either add this in parentheses after the equals
sign (if used) or append it at the end of the entry, together with other
important dates (e.g. university degree, immigration etc.). In this case one
would have to add "Heirat" ('marriage'); although this is longer than a
symbol, that shouldn't be much of a problem.
--
Joachim Mugdan, Basel, Switzerland mugdan@... JGID 5749
Researching families >from Kempen/Posen (Kepno), Breslau (Wroclaw) etc.