Family Historian User Group

Morning all,

I'm not sure if I asked this before but Is there a best way of showing the time of birth? I have started redoing my tree using templates and I realised that over the years the way the time of birth (Scottish certificates) has changed 10h 10m p.m.. , 10:10 pm and 22:10 and it got me wondering if there was a best way of entering these. I had been entering them as they showed on the certificate but thought it may be better to standardise them for ease of use/ searching.

On another point, when I entered my birth and went to add witnesses, I got to thinking should I enter my father as he was at home in England when I was born and never saw me until I was a week old, although he did register the birth. Is he a witness as Father and not just informant? My question about this is what is a witness in this case. My wifes great grandfather was at sea when her grand dad was born and they didn't register him until he was 3 months old once the father had returned from sea, so he registered the birth but is he a witness (apart from as an informant)?

1. Time of birth.

I presume you're entering this in either the Text from Source field or the Note field (perhaps as labelled text)? If in Text from Source (as part of a transcript) I would enter them as stated on the certificate. How important is it to you to be able to search for the people born at a particular time, or to have consistency when reporting? Either of those factors would drive you towards standardizing, but to be honest I can't see any need to search on them, only to include the information in a report/on a website.

2. Witnesses

A person who is involved in an event (or attribute*) in a non-principal role, is called a witness. The term witness should not be taken literally. As used in this context, it really just means - anyone involved in a non-principal role in an event. It is convenient to have a term that covers such people, and witness is the commonly-used term. A fact that has one or more witnesses associated with it, is sometimes also called a Shared Event.

That's from the Help file. However, some people extend the definition (especially for births) to include anyone affected by the event i.e. the Father and Mother even if the Father wasn't present at the event; that way, narrative reports include the birth of a person's children which is usually a pretty signifcant happening in somebody's life. (Some people do the same for the witnesses for a Death Event).

Helen

Thanks for that. I really couldn't think of a reason to search for time of birth, I really only put it in my question in case I thought of some reason at a later date .

You could enter the time of birth as a Date Phrase in addition to the Date of Birth using the ...interpreted as option.
e.g. 12 January 1922 ("10:30pm")
Use a standardised format and then the Edit > Find... command or other search methods can find them.

It is perhaps unfortunate that FH chose Fact Witness rather than Shared Fact especially as the GEDCOM tag is _SHAR.