Creating Relationships between mourners and deceased

Technically it is not mandatory to have a mourner for every deceased person. Deceased people with no mourners will still be listed in the "Yahrzeit Search" area, and they are still normal CiviCRM contacts available on other searches and reports.

Of course, in most situations there is a mourner that wants to be notified of an upcoming yahrzeit for one or more deceased people. To indicate which mourners are observing which yahrzeits do the following:

In the CiviCRM back office:

1. Go to the contact record for the mourner. (or go to the contact record of the deceased person)
2. Click "Actions ... Add Relationship"
3. Choose the "yahrzeit observed ..." relationship type and the other contact.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 above for each mourner.

If you send a yahrzeit reminder to the mourner at this point, the token for "relationship" will simply say "loved one". If you would prefer for the yahrzeit reminders to indicate how 2 people are connected, then follow the steps below:

For example: someone is observing their parent's yahrzeit:

1. Go to the contact record of the mourner.
2. Click "Actions ... Add Relationship"
3. Choose the "child of ..." relationship type and the other contact is the deceased contact.

OR

1. Go to the contact record of the deceased.
2. Click "Actions ... Add Relationship"
3. Choose the "parent of ..." relationship type and the other contact is the mourner.

An example of a deceased contact:

Relationships and Gender

In the yahrzeit tokens for reminders, the "relationship" token will say "mother" or "father" instead of "parent" as long as the gender of the deceased is known. Another example: the token will say "sister" or "brother" instead of "sibling" as long as the gender of the deceased is known.

DO NOT create different CiviCRM relationship types for each gender, this is unnecessary clutter.