Family Historian User Group

Hello,

I was wondering if anybody noticed or found a solution for narrative sentences for a living person. FH generates the sentences in past tense in all reports for living person. It reads like obituary for a living person.

Has anybody found this flaw in FH objectionable or found a way to correct it for all living persons to use "is" instead of 'was' for current state of attribute like occupation "He is" vs "He was", For residence "He lives" vs " he lived'. etc..

Any suggestion would be helpful to resolve this unpleasant flaw in FH6.

Thanks in Advance.

You can edit any individual fact sentence if you want to.

Both was and is indicate a particular point in time. If you have a fact for say 10 Jan 2020 then using was such as 'On 10 Jan 2020 he was employed as a salesman' is correct in any report. From my point of view you would only use is if you were talking to someone at this moment in time.

The flexibility to edit sentence templates in FH is pretty good and I have made changes to most to get them to read the way I prefer. Automatically generated sentences will have limitations and can appear repetitive. As the vast majority of people in a family history will be deceased, most things should be referred to as in the past.

For my 'book' I use the auto generated text as a basis and then 'tidy it up' in Word.

I have moved this to the FH General Usage forum as the General forum is inappropriate.

Even for living people most of their facts are historical. He was born... and He was educated... and for all but current occupation He was a worker...

As has been suggested, the few sentences that may need a different tense can be edited for those specific facts as explained in how_to:narrative_report_fact_sentence_templates#specific_fact_sentences|> Specific Fact Sentences.