* Residence fact sentence for wife's married surname

[mezentia]

I've come across a situation where I have two sets of electoral register entries for a couple. The residence entry is straightforward enough, I simply add a residence fact for both people, although I then noticed I can use the Witness feature to create a sentence where the other person has their name appended, e.g. "Between 1 October 1924 and 1 May 1929 he lived in Paddington with Anne Other". This is useful for use in individual narrative reports, especially when there are other family members co-habiting at the same address. The problem is that females are referenced using their maiden name. How do I construct a witness sentence template that uses the married name for a woman, and will this work for multiple couples at the same address?

The second electoral register entry is for what appears to be a business address, so I'd like to clone the Residence fact to create a Business Address fact, but I've never done this before, so some simple instructions on how to do this would be appreciated. I'd like the same witness features for the business address as the residence.

[tatewise]

There are quite a number of issues there.

If you use only one Residence Fact for one person and add the other person as a Witness, then that other person has no Residence Fact. So in their Individual Summary Report no Residence details will be included. Similarly a Query for Residence details will not include Witnesses Residences. Also Witnesses are non-standard Gedcom so will not Export reliably to other products. See also family residence (13742).

Residence Witnesses can be single or married men or women both before and after marriage. So the Surname for a women would only be their married name if the Residence Date is after their Marriage Date, and is further complicated if married more than once. So the conditional function to automatically use the correct Surname must consider sex and multiple dates - quite complex. It might be easier to manually adjust the Sentence for just those specific Residence Facts that need changing. But the general problem affects many similar scenarios such as married women Witnesses at Marriages, and Informant Witnesses at Death, etc.

It might be better to use the Occupation Fact to record a Business Address. If you decide to create your own custom Fact it will not migrate so well to other products. To create a custom Fact use Tools > Fact Types and add a new custom Event, then copy all the equivalent settings from the Residence Fact.

[Jane]

I use

Code: Select all

<para>{individual} lived {place}< at {address}>< with {role=resident}> {date}. {note}

and

Code: Select all

{individual} lived {place}< at {address}> with <{other=principal,resident}> {date} .{note}

[tatewise]

Unfortunately, that does not solve the original posted problem of the married women's surname.

[mezentia]

There are quite a number of issues there.

If I use a residence fact for each person at an address, then that fact appears on the narrative report for that individual. If I use the witness feature, the other residents for an address get a mention on all the other narrative reports for all the other individuals at that address. Thus the witness feature creates a positive relationship between the residents sharing a single address and this gets indicated in the report, something that might otherwise get overlooked by someone not familiar with that part of the family. The unwanted side effect is that the residence fact and the witness association sentences both appear in the report.

Also Witnesses are non-standard Gedcom so will not Export reliably to other products.

OK, but I'm not about to change my preferred family history software when I've spent a lot of time trying to get to grips with it.

An occupation fact for the business address would work if I knew the occupation - but I don't. The point of creating a business address fact is to record that this particular couple had some kind of business at a specific address

[tatewise]

The unwanted side effect is that the residence fact and the witness association sentences both appear in the report.

Not sure what you mean, as the sentence will say something like:
"In 1900 he lived in London at 123, Back Lane with Jane Jones and Tom Black."

OR do you mean you have also given the Witnesses their own Residence fact? Well you cannot have your cake and eat it!

It would be nice if there was an automatic way of inhibiting the Residence sentence if there was a Residence Witness entry for the same Date, but I cannot think of a way to do that. However, you could edit each such specific Residence fact Sentence box to contain {blank}. If you do that on the first one, then the Copy & Paste fact will save doing it again.

(BTW: That still leaves the problem of Jane Jones married surname.)

An occupation fact for the business address would work if I knew the occupation - but I don't.

You don't need to know the occupation so leave it blank, and the sentence will say something like:
"In 1900 he was in London at Bankside Workshop, 19 High Street."

Both the above assume you have added < at {address}> similar to Jane's suggestions.

If you want to be a bit smarter then add {=TextIf(FactValue(%FACT%)="","employed",)} to the Occupation sentence so it says:
"In 1900 he was employed in London at Bankside Workshop, 19 High Street."
or if you discover he was a joiner then it says:
"In 1900 he was a joiner in London at Bankside Workshop, 19 High Street."