Family Historian User Group

Hi all,

Is there any more information available on the proposed witness functionality in V6 of FH?

Is it going to be used to enhance the experience with shared facts (Census entries, Electoral rolls entries etc)?

Will witness functionality be combined with Role functionality to enable the Role of a participant in a shared fact to be better explained.

Yes I do come from a TMG background?

Hopefully I have my terminology correct!!


Wayne Thurley

I strongly suspect the answer to your questions

> Is there any more information available on the proposed witness functionality in V6 of FH?

No, there is no more official information.

> Is it going to be used to enhance the experience with shared facts (Census entries, Electoral rolls entries etc)?

Yes.

Whilst it is an open secret (promoted by Calico Pie) that, FH V6 will include witnesses, I have seen no further details. Calico Pie are well aware of the situation with TMG, hence I suspect the official rumour. You will note the later FH V5 updates have been updated to import Witness info from TMG, but only to a "note". I was advised that this should later be importable to the new FH V6 Witness "system". I wouldn't want to deflect Calico Pie from development, but you could try asking them as I know they are very interested to get the TMG import to work well.

I came from TMG to FH, and am fully converted to the use of the standard Gedcom feature of Shared Sources (as in Ancestral Sources Method 1) rather than witnesses, see http://www.fhug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id ... s_settings. However unlike many TMG users I made little use of sentences and Roles, so could not compare TMG sentences with FH Templates with this existing FHV5 method.

Hi Jim,

I have read up on Ancestral Sources Method 1, and if I was starting again, I might employ this method. Unfortunately I employed Method 2 in TMG and extensively used witnesses. In particular I used roles and custom facts to generate very precise and specific sentences. With 25 odd trees I would prefer not to have to retrofit all of this to Method 1 in FH.

Just out of morbid curiosity, under your method with a Census fact, if I went to any member of a census household in FH, how easy is it to see who the other members of the household are in a particular Census? Especially if the household had relatives living in the house at the time of the Census.


Wayne Thurley

Sorry to jump into this thread, but to answer your question about Census households, it is very easy.

There is a standard Query called Individuals Linked to Source.
This prompts for a Source Record and you can select the Method 1 Census Source Record.
The Query then lists all Individuals that have a Citation for that Source.

In fact this Query works for any Source Record, so that could include Marriages or Electoral Roles, etc.

There is also a Plugin List All Citations for a Source that not only lists the Individuals that have a Citation for that Source but includes Families and identifies all the specific Events that cite the Source. So it would include not just the Census Events but also any Birth Events or Marriage Events or Occupation Attributes derived from a Census.

It is easy to customise the Queries and Plugins to your specific needs.

It would also be quite easy to create a Query to list all Individuals belonging to the same household of a Method 2 Census Source.
It could filter the Individuals based on their Place &/or Address fields, or perhaps the Citation Details, so that all those belonging to the same household would be grouped together.

Thanks for all the helpful information on this topic. I am still very curious as to what other options will become available with the introduction of Witness functionality in V6.

I assume V6 availability is a long way away considering V5 is quite new.

Apologies for not replying sooner but I have been in the USA for 3 weeks. What Mike says is fine. I think there have been other forum questions re this and I don't think it is possible to produce a report, just a query, however the results of a query can usually be exported to rtf, excel, pdf etc.

As for FHV6, these things are shrouded in mystery, so perhaps someone in authority might be able to say something, or at least the state of play. Personally I don't see why they should be so shrouded, the likes of Microsoft, google etc have no problem telling us of their plans.

It's usually referred to as "Commercial-in-Confidence" or, don't tell the opposition before you have to, because we have a business to position to protect! Witness the rush/competition to be the first in the market with a user-friendly way to transfer native TMG data. Just give out enough information to encourage, tease and enthuse users/purchasers about your plans (and that you are addressing past mistakes - Microsoft), but not so much that others can beat you to market and potentially weaken your sales.

Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do keep many things secret, usually because they have to hit people with an element of (preferably) positive surprise, but still need to reveal a good deal to the developer and user community to ensure that independent software developers maintain necessary compatibility and bring other support products to market close to release dates, e.g. Windows Technical Preview (Windows 10), which I downloaded a couple of days ago and which seems to work O.K. so far (in a Virtual Machine), although no significant user differences yet from Windows 8.1, apart from the new Start Menu.

Mervyn

Two programmes that I am familiar with , Rootsmagic 6 and Legacy 8, have the facility for sharing events These implementations, in my opinion, suffer the same disadvantage. The event is not the central thing, it is the individual who 'owns' the event who is central. This makes event sharing somewhat 'lopsided' and I would not use it in any software unless the event was a record type independent of the people who shared the event. Possibly that is how it was done in TMG but I have no knowledge of that.

David