Family Historian User Group

Having entered all my family into FH I used the descendant’s narrative to produce the relevant 'book'. It all worked perfectly but I wanted to try to add some important historical events to align with individual's existence e.g. 1965 Winston Churchill died when nephew John was born.

Is there any way this can be achieved?

Many thanks in advance

If you only have a relatively few such historical events then edit the Sentence box where necessary.
e.g.
In nephew John's Property Box Facts tab for his Birth Event edit the Sentence box to say:
{individual} was born {date} {place} when Winston Churchill died.

There is also the Free Text item in the Edit Book Dialog, which can be used to insert additional information. This would be more suitable if you want to add a whole paragraph before or after someone's narrative, rather than snippets interspersed with other sentences.

Thank you both for your replies.

I was really looking at a more comprehensive system which would use a list of dates of historical items which could in some way be aligned to the dates of specific individuals within my family. So this could involve hundreds of individuals but I could choose which historical information was added to each of those individuals. Alternatively, a timeline report which would intersperse the dates of historical items with important dates within my family such as births or marriages which happened at a time when a significant historical event took place.

Sorry for being vague in my inital post.

One other possible option as you are using Narrative reports, is to create an Individual with the historical events as Facts and add those people you want to include the facts for as witnesses. If you have such a list in CSV form you might be able to use the CSV to gedcom plugin to import them to a single person.

That may be what I am looking for! Thank you Jane. I will give it a go.

This topic has been discussed before.
The Historical Event Timeline (13878) thread focussed on Query Result Sets rather than Reports.
But it did consider Reports which led to Wish List Ref 550 Historical Custom Timeline Facts being created that you can Vote for.

Thank you Mike.

I have voted for that item in the wish list. The reprts appear useful but, as you say, not exactly what i am after since I am looking for this information to be produced within a narrative.

How about create Sources for all the historical events you need.
Attach them to the relevant or new "history" fact(s).
You can then reuse these whenever you want.

Not sure where it would lie in the report, you may be able to add the SOURce to the sentence Template?

You might be able to create a shared note of "Historical Events" attached to a suitable source
and list the events using value pairs:

1066-10-14: Battle of Hastings
1485-08-22: Battle of Bosworth Field
2016-06-23: National Brainfade
etc.

then use a variation of {=GetLabelledText(%pointer to shared note%,"fact date:")}
at the end of fact sentences.

Presumably you can use an expression to put the fact date into the expression. Then just adding the source will trigger event details as part of the fact sentence.

That is an interesting idea.
It does not even need to involve a linked Source record, as a simple Note record will work.

The Sentence Template expression would be:
{=GetLabelledText( Field(Record(12,"N"),'NOTE.TEXT'), Text("@" . %FACT.DATE:ABBREV3%) ) }

That is looking at the Note record with Record Id = 12 which could contain:
@14/10/1066 Battle of Hastings took place on this day.
@22/8/1485 Battle of Bosworth Field took place this day.

The @ prefix is necessary to prevent 4/10/1066 or 2/8/1485 being treated as valid labels.

jimlad68 wrote: ↑

06 Feb 2020 22:54

How about create Sources for all the historical events you need.
Attach them to the relevant or new "history" fact(s).
You can then reuse these whenever you want.

I like this idea. I'm currently thinking about adding narrative timeline events to my tree. Is there a way to find, say, all my ancestors living in Exeter in 1854 (Bread Riots)? Any specific place at any given time, or just alive/living at any random places at any given time. And any easy way I could add a citation/source to all or selected individuals on the list?

Not sure how good you are writing Queries but the following should give strong clues:
fhugdownloads:contents:query_all_facts_filter_by_date_label_or_text|> Query:Fact ~ All Facts Filter by Date, Label, or Text ~ All Facts Filter by Date
fhugdownloads:contents:list_baptisms_and_burials_for_specific_places|> Query:Fact ~ List Baptisms and Burials for Places ~ Filter by Place and identify Ancestors
Merging those concepts should get you to Ancestors, and Place = Exeter, and Date = 1854.
But since Place and Date will be parameters you can find other combinations.

Then in the Result Set it is quite easy to go through an entry for each person and add a Source Citation.
Use Copy & Paste for all after the first one.

But you mentioned adding those to Individuals, but that will not support Narrative Report Sentence Templates.
You need to attach each Source Citation to a Fact that has a suitable Sentence Template.

Hmm. I think I need to think some more about what I want to achieve, and then I think maybe I should wait to see what V7 offers us before putting too much effort into it. Thank you Mike!

Jane wrote: ↑

05 Feb 2020 13:59

One other possible option as you are using Narrative reports, is to create an Individual with the historical events as Facts and add those people you want to include the facts for as witnesses. If you have such a list in CSV form you might be able to use the CSV to gedcom plugin to import them to a single person.

Could you explain further how to "create and Individual with historical events as Facts"? I would like to incorporate historical facts, and I have read postings in this forum, but I am still confused about how to do this. Can you break it down step-by-step? Thank you for any help you can give me.

The idea is that you create a dummy Individual record that is not an actual person.
The record only exists so you can add custom facts for whatever historical events you may want to include.
This dummy person has no conventional Birth, Marriage or Death events, just historical events.

Other real Individual records are added as Fact Witnesses to those historical events.
Then in the Narrative reports, these Individuals will gain descriptions of the historical events as determined by the Fact Witness Sentence Templates defined in Tools > Fact Types... for each historical event.

Thank you for responding to my question.

I was intrigued by the idea of a Dummy individual to hold historical records and immediately set one up. I should note that Narrative Reports are only of passing interest to me but I'm really keen to set individuals in an historical context.

Having created a source for a historical event and added it to the Dummy, I then explored Fact Witnesses. I've never used Fact Witnesses before, when they were introduced I carried on with my own way of recording the very occasional witness events. Immediately I discovered that Fact Witnesses have to have a 'Role'. Now my individuals do not have any kind of 'Role' in, say, the death of Queen Victoria, the end of slavery or the Exeter Bread Riots. These are things that happen around them, that impinge on their lives but do not involve them directly.

My solution has been to cut out the Dummy middleman. I have created a custom attribute called Historical Event (despite the name, it is an attribute so that it can have a value, the name of the event). I can create a source and add any kind of information about a particular historical event, and add it to the timeline of any individual through the Historical Event attribute. Mike's earlier suggestions about using Queries to add Source Citations to multiple individuals will be very helpful.

Maureen, yes, that will work, but you will have to re-enter or Copy & Paste those Historical Events to each person that lived through them. Furthermore, if you wish to update one of those Historical Events to add or correct some details, it will involve finding and repeating that update in every copy.

Whereas, the Dummy Individual technique holds all the Historical Events in one record.
Don't get hung up over the Fact Witness terminology suggesting the other people actually witnessed the Historical Events.
Fact Witness links simply couple one person to another fact for enumerable reasons, e.g. the person could have the Role of Beneficiary to a Will Event even though they were not directly involved.
So the Role for the Fact Witness link to those Historical Events could be Alive. It does not matter because the Role does not get used in the Sentence Template or Fact Description for these Historical Events.

One suggestion I would make is to use the {value} of the attribute and the {note} text in the Sentence Templates and Witness Templates. Then each Historical Event will be described differently depending on its attribute value and Note text.

Arishmell and Tatewise: these are interesting ideas. I am trying to achieve historical context for various ancestors on my family tree (White family and Parker family). I will work with the idea of using {value} and {note} text in sentence and witness templates to add variety to the descriptions as they appear in the narrative format. I was also thinking of using multiple historical fact types as a means of varying the text.
I also need to spend some time figuring out the ideas presented by Tatewise in Feb 2020 regarding use of Queries to add Source Citations to multiple persons.

Thanks all

I'm not clear why you need "multiple historical fact types as a means of varying the text".
Surely, the {value} and {note} can contain any variant of text that you could possibly want.
If you dispensed with {value} and just used {note} as the Sentence Template then you have total control.

For further variations, you could consider labelled Note text and the =GetLabelledText(...) function or the TYPE Descriptor and {%FACT.TYPE%} code. See Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates under Custom Fact Fields that explains similar tchniques.

What is your purpose for adding "Source Citations to multiple persons" in this context?

Maureen, yes, that will work, but you will have to re-enter or Copy & Paste those Historical Events to each person that lived through them. Furthermore, if you wish to update one of those Historical Events to add or correct some details, it will involve finding and repeating that update in every copy.

Surely the attaching of each Historical Event to multiple people applies equally to the Dummy individual method? And surely any updating would be done to the Source, not the Citation, so only done once? (I am a Splitter).

So the Role for the Fact Witness link to those Historical Events could be Alive. It does not matter because the Role does not get used in the Sentence Template or Fact Description for these Historical Events.

That is interesting. Trying to think of a Role for a Fact Witness really floored me!

And yes, I am using the {note} text in the Sentence Templates.

With the Historical Events copied into each person's Individual record, you first have to find the events you want to copy.
Where would you keep them for easy access?
To copy them to multiple people requires tediously switching repeatedly from Individual record to Individual record in order to paste the event. Then you would have to repeat that for the next Historical Event.
To update those multiple copies of the same Historical Event would require them each to found with a Query and then the update copy & pasted into each one.

In the Dummy Individual scenario, you only need to open that one dummy record and all the Historical Events are listed.
Just right-click each event in turn that applies and add each person who is alive at the date of that event.
You can even select several Individuals in one go and add them with their Role of Alive entered just once.
Try it, and you will see how much more efficient this method is.
In this case, the Historical Events only exist in one record, so any updates only affect that one copy.
It is the Witness Sentence Template that causes the update to appear against each Individual.

I don't understand where Sources and Citations come into play. They are not necessary for this feature.

Thank you everybody for your interesting ideas for adding secondary sources social history narratives to narrative reports.
I will explore these suggestions to add extra context to my FH7 narratives.

TMG had something of that sort, which I never used.
You can see the list at http://www.tmgtips.com/timelines.htm