What GEDCOM event tag should I use for a Nun taking vows?

[nk9]

GEDCOM declares an Ordination person event tag (ORDN). This is described in the standard documentation as "Receiving authority to act in religious matters."

However, it appears that Nuns aren't members of the clergy, they are technically laypeople. And thus, they aren't ordained, they take vows. A small number of nuns in certain religious traditions have been ordained at points, but it's far from normal.

So I'm wondering: what GEDCOM person event type should I use for the date that a Sister takes her vows? Do I need to just use a generic RELI event? And why isn't there a VOWS event, anyway?

I see that the GEDCOM 5.3 standard document contains a proposal for a _VOW event tag in Appendix B, but this seems to have disappeared from the version 7 release candidate (linked above). 🤔

[tychonievich]

_VOW was considered in 5.3 but not included in 5.4 two years later; that was before any of the current steering committee were involved in the discussions so I can't speak more to the rationale for that noninclusion.

I expect you'll find a mix of people using ORDN and people using EVEN for a nun taking vows, depending on their understanding of what those vows mean. Both can be clarified to mean a nun's vows with a TYPE substructure and have their religious order indicated with a RELI substructure.

If you expect to have a large number of such non-ordination vows, using an extension like _VOW may make sense. Extension tags beginning with _ have always been allowed in all versions of GEDCOM. If you'd like to facilitate their interoperability you could register it on the https://github.com/FamilySearch/GEDCOM-registries repository. You could also request that it be considered for standardization with an pull request adding it to the attribue-event-request page or with an issue.

[nk9]

Thanks for the comprehensive response!