Family Historian User Group

I'm sort of thinking aloud here, but if someone can point me in the right direction...

An occupation gets recorded against an individual multiple times (from censuses, BMD & Parish records etc.). Left untouched, this leads to an unwieldy string of "In (year) (name) was an (occupation)" sentences in narrative reports. To tidy this up , since quite often the occupation is essentially the same over a whole lifetime, I can just create one single occupation attribute, with a "between" date range, citing the multiple sources. Sometimes though a person may have two different careers. The person I'm thinking of in my tree, for example, started life as a builder and ended up as a musician.

If a person only ever had one occupation, the dates are unimportant. In that situation I would like the report to just say "Bob was a builder" and leave it at that. If a person had more than one occupation in a lifetime, though, then the dates come in to play. In that situation, I would like the report to revert to the more usual "between date and date Bob was a builder. Between date and date Bob was a musician."

Can that be readily achieved?

Just enter the relevant Occupation attribute(s) with the dates as you want them to appear. If, under those circumstances but not others, you want dates on the attributes but not on the report, then it's probably best to alter the narrative sentence for that single attribute.

Incidentally, you might want to think whether you prefer "between 1978 and 1994"(say) or "from 1978 to 1994". The latter implies throughout that time interval, whereas the first would be satisfied by then having that occupation on just one day somewhere, don't know where, between 1978 and 1994. Depends what you mean.

The difference between the 2 phrases is more memorably given by comparing "He was born between 1940 and 1945" with "He was born from 1940 to 1945" - the latter being one heck of a labour!

You're not wrong.

If I know for sure someone worked from the ages of, say, 14 to 65 then I would use from-to dates. In a lot of cases though I can only date their employment from two censuses -- so I know they were working in that period but can't say for sure when they began or finished -- in which case I use between x-y.

As to just leaving the general occupation attribute undated, I can't believe I didn't immediately think of that. Talk about overlooking the bleedin' obvious!

Strictly speaking, in the GEDCOM specification, Events are allowed to use before/after/between Date Ranges, whereas Attributes are allowed to use from/to Date Periods, although that is rarely enforced.
The argument is that an Event can only occur on one Date but may not be sure exactly when, whereas an Attribute applies for a period of time.

To make the Sentence say He was a builder roughly from 1900 to 1940 then edit the Sentence in that specific Occupation and add the word roughly. See how_to:narrative_report_fact_sentence_templates|> Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates.

tatewise wrote:Strictly speaking, in the GEDCOM specification, Events are allowed to use before/after/between Date Ranges, whereas Attributes are allowed to use from/to Date Periods, although that is rarely enforced. ...

(Anyone not interested in the GEDCOM specification should ignore this post!)

I just had to check this up, Mike. I would say that the formal specification makes no such distinction - both Attribute and Event use EVENT_DETAIL, which uses DATE_VALUE, which can use either DATE_PERIOD or DATE_RANGE regardless of being an event or attribute.

However, the examples quoted and explanations given are very much couched in terms of what you said. I think the assumption is very much made there (as elsewhere) that an Event is a one-day thing, which isn't codified in the standard and is something I personally don't accept. After all, what was the First World War? It was an event, it sure wasn't an attribute. (You could, of course, describe it as a series of distinct one day events, e.g. Declaration of War .... thru to ... Armistice (or whatever you choose to finish off WW1) but that seems to put the cart before the horse).

Interesting, if you have that turn of mind....

On reflection I think you are correct Adrian.
I was probably thinking of those examples, and the wording in Draft 5.5.1 that puts it even more strongly by saying:

As a general rule, events are things that happen on a specific date. Use the date form ‘BET date AND date’ to indicate that an event took place at some time between two dates. Resist the temptation to use a ‘FROM date TO date’ form in an event structure. If the subject of your recording occurred over a period of time, then it is probably not an event, but rather an attribute or fact.

Also I have used a GEDCOM Validator that enforces that concept.

AdrianBruce wrote:whatever you choose to finish off WW1

03 October 2010, by some reckonings:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -ends.html

(useless bit of completely OT trivia there... sorry!)