* Witnesses in narrative reports

[Peter Collier]

I'm new to FH and so far I'm very impressed, although there's a bit of a learning curve! There are a couple of issues I can't find an answer to in the forum or elsewhere - can anyone point me in the right direction?

Firstly, where I have created my various GRO birth certificates as separate sources, the person who registered the birth in each case is entered (via AS) as an informant. This adds a witness fact to the individual record of the person concerned. So far, so good. When I then create (for example) a narrative ancestor report, I see this witness fact is included. I don't really want it in there though - it's particularly annoying in families with multiple children and you end up with half a page of "x was an informant for the birth of y..." statements for every other person in the report.

Is there a way to specify that this (or any other) fact type be excluded from any given report? As far as I can see, the only options to block the sentence are to delete the underlying fact (which I don't want to do), or to find and manually edit the sentence for each and every instance, which would be monstrously time consuming and frustrating.

My second issue also concerns report texts and relates to my biological great-grandfather. Essentially unknown, he is nevertheless in my tree as I do have a very small amount of information about him that I want to record, although no name or dates (having him there also helps to better chart the relationship between my late grandmother and her half-siblings). However, to be blunt, the individual in question raped my great grandmother while she was working in his family's domestic service and my grandmother was the result. Because of this, and because I have so little information on him anyway, I have the man set to private as I don't want him popping up in reports as having been the spouse of, or in a relationship with, or having "met" my grandmother. That's the kind of thing that would give some relatives a fit of the vapours - and rightly so.

Having set him to private I have found that, as intended, there is now no mention of my great-grandfather in a narrative ancestor report. However, against my great-grandmother there was a sentence fragment relating to being in some kind of a relationship - the report had dropped the individual but left half a sentence behind. I have found that if I switch off the option to generate automatic text for missing facts this sentence fragment disappears. However, in doing that I also lose all the fancy padding elsewhere in the report that was doing a pretty impressive job ("not much info recorded about x" (or words to that effect) and so on). Such a pity. Can anyone think of any workarounds that would allow me to chop just this one instance of automatically generated text, while leaving the remaining 99.9% elsewhere in the report untouched? Does this sound like a bug I should report to Calico?

[tatewise]

Those are interesting observations Peter, but I am not sure I have ideal solutions.

Witness Fact Sentences in Narrative Reports
(1) Witness Sentence
If you are happy to eliminate those Witness Fact Sentences from all forms of Narrative Report then that can be done by editing the Birth Fact Type Witness Sentence Template as follows:
Use Tools > Fact Types, select the Birth Event, and click Edit.
I suspect you have not created an Informant witness Role, so click the Roles button.
Click Add to create a New Role and enter Informant twice.
Notice that the Witness Sentence Template defines the default sentence shown in the Narrative Reports.
So delete it all, and enter {=Text("")} in its place, which is a trick to always produce nothing.
Click Create and OK out of the dialogues - problem solved.

FYI: Whenever you create a new Witness Role such as the AS Birth Informant then the Fact Type must be edited as above to create that Witness Role and its associated Sentence, etc. AS omits to mention that.

(2) Report Option
In most Reports the Options allow Events/Attributes to be filtered by a List Only or Exclude List selection, but Witness Role Facts are not Events/Attributes in their own right, so extra Options would be needed to selectively include/exclude them. Please report this requirement to Calico Pie and refer to this posting.

Narrative Report Privacy Problem
(1) Report Bug
I believe you have discovered a bug in the Privacy handling in Reports that must be reported to Calico Pie.
Depending on the Marriage Status the Report might say She married . or She and her partner were an unmarried couple. or She had a relationship with . that not only are often badly formed and have a space before the dot, but also as you say reveal a relationship that should be kept Private.

A workaround in the meantime in both cases is to use Save Report As > Word-processor Document (RTF) and edit the .rtf file with a word-processor such as MS Office Word or OpenOffice Writer.

[Peter Collier]

Is it best to report a requirement for including/excluding witness role facts directly to Calico Pie, whatever their email is, or just post into the wishlist thread on this forum?

[tatewise]

I think it is an important omission, so report it directly. If they respond negatively, then add it to the Wish List Requests.

There is a contact form on their www.family-historian.co.uk website Support tab, but you can also use support@family-historian.co.uk

[Peter Collier]

Bug re. private individuals/events appearing in reports reported to Calico Pie and slated for a fix. Their reply to my email:

Thank you for reporting that. We will be bringing out a minor update soon and will fix this issue in that.

Family Historian Support

[tatewise]

FH V6.1 should be out soon, and Pre-release of version 6.1 (13143) is available now with the following improvements related to this thread.

Witness Fact Sentences in Narrative Reports
The code {blank} can be used to inhibit any Sentence Template.

Narrative Report Privacy Problem
These problems are fixed.