Family Historian User Group

Those blank Death events have possibly arrived via imports.

Another common cause is to enter a Death Date or Place via the Main tab, but realising you wanted Burial, you delete those erroneous Date &/or Place boxes. Unfortunately, that does not delete the now empty Death event.

Not an issue just an anomaly on the Mac with keyboard mapping in the VirtualMachine

Thanks for checking Peter.

A possible new issue:

In the Focus window F7 and F8 don't work for moving children's order around. This may be because I am using a VM on a Mac but generally the function keys work OK. Can someone please check on a Windows machine? If OK on Windows then I will delete this post.

F7 & F8 work fine for me using Windows 7.

Colin (Valkrider),

fn+F7 and fn+F8 work fine for me on my MacBook Pro with VirtualBox V. 5.0.14 (Guest Additions installed) + Windows 10 Pro + FH 6.1.1. Also checked my WINE (Wineskin) Test installation and the key combinations work there as well.

Mervyn

I haven't been using FH for months and was pleased to notice a new (updated pre-release).
Reading through the discussions about 6.1.1 (and today about 6.1.2) there is one thing that I would like to add (or rather emphasize since Mike already has written something about it) and that is the extension of the witness concept.

Let me start by (for me) the basic problem: principal versus witness. I have never understood the need for the difference between the two. In essence we have a source describing an (or more than one) event and naming people participating in that (those) event(s). So, when recording the event(s) we want to record participants and they will usually have played a specific role (or more roles) in that event. And, as a default, we can have the roles "principal" and "witness" to support the default sentences using these roles. To me this would be an elegant solution and a real way forward to not only store basic genealogy info in the database but also the more complex data (e.g. notary, court etc.).

Since the better and better support for shared events (from the above you will understand that I can't imagine genealogy software without it) it is now possible to get rid of the old hampering of "the principal" (as a special kind of person) and the witness (which already may have roles). Just define the principal to also be a participant with the role principal and that's it. No need to suppress the principal sentence with e.g. {blank}, no need to introduce some kind of priority (every participant is the same).

To conclude:
1) I see FH moving in the direction described above and welcome it greatly!
2) To better support Simon's "residence" example with witnesses "without a principal" I - for the short term -support Mike's idea of {blank} to suppress the principal sentence. Also Calico Pie should implement Simon's claim to the full (currently the witness/principal doesn't show a sentence).
3) For a real solution I would like to to get rid of the special treatment of some of the participants all the way. Just participants with roles opens numerous new possibilities to easy and correctly record source information in a genealogy database!

The reason there needs to be a Principal and Witness(es) at some point in the database, is that is the way they are represented in Gedcom, which forms the FH database:
INDI.BIRT = Principal Birth Event Fact
INDI.BIRT._SHAR[1] = 1st Shared Witness
INDI.BIRT._SHAR[2] = 2nd Shared Witness and so on

You cannot have Witness(es) without a Principal, but it is more the Fact that is the Principal in the above structure than the Individual who is Principal for all the Facts.

Bear in mind that only INDI.BIRT is fully defined in GEDCOM 5.5 and _SHAR is a user-defined extension often not recognised by other genealogy products. The Export Gedcom File Plugin takes that into account depending on the target product, and creates synthetic custom facts for Witnesses where necessary, but the Principal Fact is sacrosanct.

Mike,

Yes, sacrosanct is indeed the right word to describe the principal situation: backward compatibility versus innovation.

Probably the best solution for the current implementation would then be a working version of Simon's residence example with suppression of the principal by e.g {blank}?

If that would work it's not really nice, but usable to cope with (for me numerous) situations where there is parity between principals and witnesses.

(This is my first posting, coming from TMG and finally made my final import into FH)

The new (?) date format dd.mm.yyyy is what we use in Norway, but it is only for "short date" and not for "Standard date".
How can I see the short date format in all windows and in the reports?
I hope it will be a Standard date format also, which we never had in TMG.

Torleif Haugodegard

JoopvB, in a related vein my research query is how to show connections between non related individuals in the database. These would normally be things like 'Shared Witness'. My own method is to use a standard Gedcom shared source, surely the source is THE connecting factor, and each individual has a relevant fact (probably custom event) tied to the source, then non related individuals connected with a standard Gedcom ASSOciation. My method has no need for non-Gedcom Witness, and at least since FH v6.1 ASSOiations can now easily be used in narrative reports and previously also in Individual reports and Diagrams.

So Theoretically all connections can be calculated by Sources. However I imagine these connections would be difficult to automate, and there would need to be a way to select which Sources to use, especially 'generic' sources. It would be nice to produce a query, report or even a diagram that showed a full list of interconnections.
Therefore no need for 'Shared Witness' or ASSOciations.

I can see that those who like verbose narrative, might want to include 'Shared Witness' details in their sentence, but for me it would be in the source anyway. I suppose the only way around that would be to have another query/report/diagram that showed non related individuals via 'Shared Witness' and/or ASSOciations.

OK, lets have all 3 options. Now don't all volunteer at once. I might be able to do it in many separate steps for one person with queries and manual intervention, but for the whole database!!!!!

Torleif, welcome.

Use Tools > Preferences > General tab and click the Help button for a description of Preferred Standard/Short Date Formats that links to Date Formats where it shows that the Qualifier on a Date determines its display format.
e.g.
To get Short Format use the ABBREV3 Qualifier.

However, as it says, this largely only applies to Reports.

The date format for on screen windows will almost always use Standard Date.

Yes, I now get the Norwegian date format dd.mm.yyyy in reports by using ABBREV3.
Thank you.