* How to add a detailed fact

[JohnT]

Hi all,

I have been making use of the free Ancestry week and have found a lot of information regarding my Mother and siblings leaving Singapore in 1942. I would like to be able to make a detailed account of the event and associate it with them.
I am unsure of the best way to present this. My Father would not be linked with this as he was a serving soldier at the time.

Thanks in advance.

John

[davidf]

John

You could use the emigration fact or possibly more effectively create an "evacuation" fact. That puts it "in the tree" for the individuals concerned.

Detailed accounts do not sit easily within a "fact based system", because detailed accounts are often an accumulation of facts and it can get a bit artificial to create too many facts (captured, interned, etc.).

One thing that you could do is separately (e.g. within a word processor) write "the account", citing sources within the account. That account could then be a separate secondary source for those facts that you chose to specifically associate. You could either attach the document via a media file and hence as a citation media to the evacuation fact, or take the text from it and put it in a shared FH note (attached to the individuals concerned).

If you use the FH report writing or website/CD making functionality you also need to think how you would want the detailed account to appear (if other than as a source for the evacuation fact).

[tatewise]

Hi John, there are a number of alternatives.
You also need to consider how you may want the information to appear in Reports.

You could treat the information you have found as source documents, especially if they are mainly official records.
Create one or more Source records to capture the document details, with a transcript in Text From Source and images linked to the Media tab, i.e. in much the same way you capture Birth/Marriage/Death Certificates.
Then perhaps add a Departure fact to your mother and siblings, and add Citations of the Source records to them all.
To discover the Departure fact see glossary:work_with_fact_sets#custom_facts_from_other_products|> Custom Facts from other Products.
BTW: Having added the Departure fact and Citations to your mother you can Copy & Paste it into her siblings.

Alternatively, you could create a custom Biography fact to accommodate these types of exceptional episodes.
The necessary descriptive narrative should be placed in a Note record that can be linked to the Biography fact added to your mother and her siblings to avoid duplicating the same information for each person.
There may need to be some supporting Source Citations for formal documents.

[JohnT]

Many thanks davidf and tatewise for your thoughts.

I will experiment with both ideas to see which will work best with reports etc.

i am rather rusty using FH as not done much for a few years. (just upgraded from ver 4)

Regards and stay safe.