Meanwhile, the RootsMagician should see to it that this misinterpretation of the GEDCOM standard gets corrected so that it does not adversely affect people interested in migrating from competing programs such as Family Tree Builder and The Master Genealogist and, no doubt, others that do interpret the specification correctly.
I'm not sure whether it's better to post the following comments here, or in the other thread about "Y" in Death Location to which Tom refers. But I decided to post here. As Tom has already indicated, the fundamental problem here seems to be the fact that there is a Living flag in RM and there is a Death fact in RM, and the two interact in some curious ways. Further, there is not consistency within RM between the way RM handles the Living flag and the Death fact in GEDCOM import vs. the way it handles them on GEDCOM export. I'm not 100% sure (and I'm sure that Tom will correct me if I'm wrong), but I think this is another case where RM can't import its own GEDCOM correctly. If so, then it's another case where drag and drop has difficulty.
But none of that is really the reason I'm posting this message. I'm posting this message to speak against the whole concept of the Living flag. The problem with the Living flag it is that it's completely static, and the ability to filter based on whether a person is still living or not needs to be dynamic. It's almost like the Static Groups vs. Dynamic Groups discussions that we have so many times.
I offer as an example of "doing it right" the way GEDCOM is handled when it is uploaded to rootsweb.com. When you upload GEDCOM to rootsweb.com, you can if you wish upload your GEDCOM with no Living vs. not Living filtering whatsoever in the GEDCOM itself. Rather, there is a pretty rich set of criteria that you can use for filtering and the criteria is totally dynamic. For example, you can tell rootsweb.com to consider people born after 1920 and without a death fact to be considered living for the purposes of filtering. Then 5 minutes later or 5 days later or 5 months later, you can change the filter to consider people born after 1915 and without a death fact to be considered living for the purposes of filtering. You GEDCOM doesn't have to be reloaded or changed in any way. The only thing that has to be changed is the filtering itself. I just think this is a whole lot better approach to filtering than is the Living flag.
Jerry