Family Historian User Group

I've not been on here for a long time, and I have tried searching but come up with nothing relevant, so apologies if this has already been discussed.

What is the 'best' way to record details such as aircraft or medals relating to military service. At the moment I have medals recorded as general possessions as they were entered in V4 days. I've recently upgraded to V7 and see that the recording of facts has been much expanded and improved.

As a specific example, my uncle was "missing presumed dead" and never found. I have the record of the crash and would like to record the particular aircraft he was in. I could just add it into a note, but for me it's of more importance than that.

My father was in the army and it would be good to record the different battles (WWII) that he was in. At the moment I added these as Residence facts, but this doesn't quite fit so wondered if there was a 'better' method.

I'm running V7.0.2 with the military tab and fact set installed.

It really depends on how you want to present the stories of the people who might have military etc, information.

I actually take a great deal of interest in that sort of thing so tended to create my own military fact types - I find creating them easy so confess that I seldom look at anyone else's fact sets. So I created things like Military Service attribute (value = name of the unit served in), Wounded event, Court Martial event, Awarded attribute (value = name of gallantry medal awarded), Issued With attribute (value = names of campaign medals issued), and probably some more besides. Against the events or attributes concerned, I will then write an extensive Note.

My two major means of getting data out will be queries and narrative reports.

The finer the distinctions made between fact types (such as distinguishing gallantry and campaign medals), the easier it is to run off detailed queries. But, having more and more fact types results in narrative reports that get disrupted. For instance, I might have a Military Service attribute whose note covers their service from 1915 to demob in 1919, followed by a Wounded event for 1916. You can see that in a narrative report (indeed in any report), it would print the story from 1915 to 1919 and then jump back to being wounded in 1916. A bit disruptive.

There are different ways of getting round this. If I think that an event like Promotion is not going to be the subject of a query, then I'll just bundle the details of the promotion into the Note for the Military Service attribute. On the other hand, an important thing such as Awarded will probably be the subject of a query but to avoid repetition or narrative reversals, I might add the details of the award into the Note for the Military Service attribute, then also enter the Awarded attribute but suppress its printing in narrative reports.

Compare this with the minimalist approach that others might take of just bundling everything into Military Service and its note, or even into an Occupation of "Soldier". Or even into person level Notes.

So to try and answer your specifics -

• Medals - I've mentioned above;
• Aircraft - I'd probably just mention those in the Note to Military Service, or in the Note to the Death event;
• Battles - again, I'd probably just mention those in the Note to Military Service.

If, however, you feel like you might want to run a query to list everyone who flew in an Avro Manchester (poor souls*), then you're probably looking at an Aircraft attribute - to avoid repetition or narrative reversals, you could consider putting the aircraft details into the Military Service attribute as well, then suppressing the Aircraft attribute in the reports.

You could probably do similar for battles - put details into the Military Service attribute, also create a Battle event that is then suppressed in Narrative Reports. The place and address(?) for the Battle event will be the place of the battle.

Note that on the last two, I'm thinking out loud - it's not something I've done. Yet.

These are my ideas tonight - tomorrow is another day and others might have different ideas.

* - Avro Manchester - twin engined predecessor to the 4 engined Avro Lancaster. The Manchester's Vulture engines were more powerful than the Lancaster's Merlins, but were new, not properly developed and unreliable. I am not sure about the ratio of Manchesters lost to engine failure compared to those lost to enemy action, but it wasn't good.

One feature that Adrian has not mentioned is labelled Note text.
So for example you could add some labelled Note text in a Military Service fact such as
Aircraft: Avro Manchester
That can be detected in Queries and Plugins using the =GetLabelledText(...) function.
It can also be pulled into Sentence Templates using the same function to form part of a Narrative sentence.
See FHUG Knowledge Base Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates under Custom Fact Fields.

Thanks very much Adrian and Mike. I need to have a think about how I might want to use the information later, and use that to inform the approach I take. Very interesting to see the two methods, as I've come across custom facts before, but not thought about using them in this context, and I've not come across labelled notes before, so will investigate those. I guess it comes down to making a(n informed) decision and then sticking with it.

Thanks again

I have searched help for labelled text. What is it and I wonder if I need it. I post this only because it helps to know what the OP is doing with Military facts.
I have a First World War Project. It is small, just 1,100 people.
I have a custom event Milit Serv brought in from previous software which I use for almost everything.
But I also downloaded an fh list called Military 2. Is this a GEDCOM standard list?
This list puzzles me.
Why is military service in fh an attribute? The Service number is also an attribute although in WW1, men frequently had more than one service number. And more than one unit. I have been shoving it all into the same Note field or using a note plus the field for a Military Service Number.
I need to sort this out if I am going to run queries.

The FHUG Knowledge Base Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates under Custom Fact Fields explains labelled Note text.
e.g.
In any Fact, on the Facts tab, each line of the local Note box can contain a 'label and a 'value' such as:
Aircraft: Avro Manchester
Anywhere an expression is allowed in Queries, Diagrams, Reports, etc, the following function will return Avro Manchester
=GetLabelledText( %FACT.NOTE2%, "Aircraft: " ) where %FACT.NOTE2% must be the appropriate data ref for the Fact.

The Military 2 facts are all Custom Facts (if they were standard GEDCOM they would already be defined in FH).

Custom Attributes are often preferred by authors because they have a 'value' field that Events do not have.

If somebody has more than one service number then enter the Service Number attribute more than once, in the same way that if somebody has more than one job you would enter the Occupation Attribute more than once.

E Wilcock wrote: ↑

31 Mar 2021 08:17

I have searched help for labelled text. What is it and I wonder if I need it. ...

Labelled Text is not obvious - I use it for one attribute-type only - the value of an estate that's been for probate. In that case, it's like I wish I had two different attribute values for the one fact. One value is for the actual cash value. The other value is for what sort of an estate it is - i.e. real, personal, both, etc. With labelled text, I can put the cash value in the (ordinary) attribute value and the type of estate in the labelled text. I have also altered the narrative sentence to pick up both "values".

Like I say, it's not obvious. It's one of these things that I put my tongue in my cheek and say, "If you're asking whether you need it - you don't". (This is not to dismiss it - as I said, I use it myself, but I started from a need for something that, it turned out that labelled text happened to satisfy.)

E Wilcock wrote: ↑

31 Mar 2021 08:17

... Why is military service in fh an attribute? The Service number is also an attribute although in WW1, men frequently had more than one service number. And more than one unit. I have been shoving it all into the same Note field or using a note plus the field for a Military Service Number.
I need to sort this out if I am going to run queries.

As Mike says, enter them as many times as you need. I use Military Service as an attribute, where the value contains the name of the unit that they served with. So each of my WW1 relatives should have one or more Military Service attributes, each containing the name of a single unit that they served in, hopefully dated to get them in the right order. Personally, I just write the "service" number into the notes for the relevant Military Service attribute - that way it comes out in reports and that works for me. As usual there are several ways of doing things.