Family Historian User Group

Hi All,

Could anybody guide me where to set and/or change the sentence. He and ------ had the following children. the word had/have/survived by has many conditions of living parents/children etc. Where can I change this as a default and override for individual non-living person. I tried child count template but it did not change. I want to change the sentence defaulted word "had" to

"survived by" - for non-living parents with some or all living children
"have" for living parents with all living children
"had" for one living parent and all or some living children.

I would appreciate guidance please.

Regards

That concern has been raised before, but that sentence currently cannot be customised in FH V6.
It may improve with FH V7 that is reputed to have better report writer features.
However, I have no idea whether it will have the conditional processing necessary to cater for all your options.
As an intellectual exercise you could try writing a Family Query that displays the desired verb in its Result Set for each Family group.

So the only workaround at present is to use the Save Reports As... a PDF File or Word-Processor Document (RTF) and then edit with a PDF editor or word-processor such as MS Word.

Bear in mind also that in your example of "survived by" - for non-living parents with some or all living children you may be omitting some important information from the report if you do not list the children who had pre-deceased the parents. Some of them might have reached adulthood and had families of their own, even if their own parents outlived them.

If you want to indicate how many, or which, children were alive at the time of an individual's death, you could record this in the note field for the death event. The information will then appear in the report, although not in the section which lists all the children. (That section will, however, include any deaths of children, from which the information can be deduced).

I agree that in the case of living parents the word 'have' is generally better than 'had', but as you have realised this only works when all the children are living.

Deriving the perfect verb for every scenario to everyone's satisfaction is virtually impossible but something like one of the following may be a globally acceptable compromise.

She and John Smith are recorded with the following children:
or
The children of her and John Smith are:
or
Her and John Smith's children are recorded as:

Note that currently, even if only one child, the sentence still says children !

I Think I like this suggestion and removes any discomfort and will work for all cases.

I advise that you report your problem/proposal to Calico Pie using the how_to:about#problem_reporting|> Problem Reporting support ticket method and suggest it could be incorporated into FH V7.