Family Historian User Group

When someone writes a will, a Will event is used to record the fact. However, sometimes the person writes one or more Codicils so as to alter the provisions of the original will. Given that there isn't a pre-defined Codicil fact, I'm wondering how others handle this.

Up to now I've used an extra Will fact and made clear in the Notes that it's a Codicil, but this doesn't seem quite right to me. The alternatives seem to be either a user-defined Codicil fact, or referring to it in the Notes of the original Will fact. Would either approach have any particular pros or cons?

If using the existing Will fact, I wondered if it would work to record the information with a Codicil: meta-field in the Notes. However, one of my ancestor's wills has four Codicils, so what would happen if there were four meta-fields in the Notes, each with the same Codicil: tag? Or do all the meta-fields need to be different for this to work properly?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Arthur

My understanding is that adding a Codicil is effectively creating a new Will but just avoids the tedium of having to rewrite the majority of it.

The Will (Codicil) event would have a new Date and maybe Place/Address and new Witnesses, etc.
The Note and Sentence could make it clear it is only the Codicil that has been added, perhaps by using a meta-field and making the Sentence Template accommodate the wording to say a Codicil was added.

To answer your other question, you cannot have multiple meta-fields with the same label.
You would need Codicil1:, and Codicil2:, et seq.

I appear to have used the Will fact for the codicils as well. My note for the event makes it clear that this is a codicil.

Sometimes (but not always) I have amended the sentence for the narrative report to reflect the different action.

Seems to me that the only real reason for splitting the 2, would be if you wanted heavy duty analysis of the codicils as distinct from wills. Or you didn't feel that the narrative sentence (plus note) really worked for you.

Thank you for your thoughts on this. On balance, I think it's probably going to be simplest to stick with multiple Will facts, with suitable notes to explain that these are Codicils. And as Mike pointed out, having additional facts, rather than cramming everything into the original one, allows for different Addresses, Witnesses etc.

However, what I see I haven't done, and probably should, is refer to the Codicils in the original Will fact Notes.

I rarely produce narrative reports, so I'm not too worried about sentences. In any case, the Codicil issue is fairly uncommon, so it would probably be easier (for me, at present) to do a one-off sentence override than to devise one that would accommodate it.

And thanks for the confirmation about meta-fields needing different labels: I suspected this would be the case, but hadn't been able to find it in the Knowledge Base.

Arthur

Regarding meta-field labels, you could use whatever arrangement of labels you like, including multiple identical labels.
BUT if you want to reference them in say a Sentence Template, then that relies of the =GetLabelledText(Note,Label) function, which as its help says "would search the specified long text field for this label and if found, it would return the text that came immediately after that label (up to the end of the paragraph)". So it will only ever find the first of multiple identical labels.
However, you don't use Narrative Reports and Sentence Templates so that restriction is unlikely to arise.

Thanks, Mike. Presumably, then, if listing all the codicils under a single Will event, you could do the following:

If there was only one codicil you'd use the meta-field Codicil: in the fact note, but if there was more than one you'd identify them separately as Codicil 1: Codicil 2: etc.

Define the sentence using all possible meta-fields, ie Codicil: Codicil 1: Codicil 2: etc?

Then if there was only one codicil, the sentence would ignore the instructions for Codicil 1: Codicil 2: etc; and if there was more than one it would ignore the instruction for Codicil:.

As I said, I doubt I'll do this myself, but it might help someone else.

Yes, that should work.

Thanks for confirming that.

Add a custom fact perhaps?

I know TMG used had a custom tag CODI for codicils.

FH allows custom tags.