Family Historian User Group

I am quite proud of myself for working out how to make my own query to find all the different occupations in my database. I appreciate the need to have a standardised form of entry - so agricultural labourer rather than ag. lab, AL, etc. But is there any way of keeping a person's specific occupation (e.g. throstle doffer, scutcher) and having a generic term to group them (e.g. cotton mill worker)? I suppose something similar in military occupations would also be useful.

I do quite like having the specific term noted - they can show subtle changes of occupation or of fortune.

I'm assuming the term 'occupation descriptor' is something to do with Gedcom? It did look like something that could be used, but I can't see that.

The experience of creating a Query is undoubtedly worthwhile.

You may also be interested in the Tools > Work with Data > Occupations... command that lists all Occupations.
When entering an Occupation value, clicking on the [...] button on the right of the box displays that list.
In Ancestral Sources there is a similar droplist option for occupations.

In the Plugin Store, there is Occupations Per Census Year and Gender that lists all Occupations in various ways.

You could use the Descriptor field, as FH does very little with it, although its GEDCOM purpose is slightly different.
It involves always editing that field via the All tab. Its data ref is %INDI.OCCU.TYPE%.

An alternative is a labelled Note using the format Occupation: throstle doffer
That can be accessed using =GetLabelledText(%INDI.OCCU.NOTE2%,"Occupation:")

Those two options are discussed in Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates under Custom Fact Fields and in Recording a Civil Partnership under Standard Marriage Event which also mentions the Cause field that you could 'misuse'.

A simple way is to add a catergory to each occupation as a prefix, denoting the main trade!

E.g Your Throssle Doffer could simply be written as Cotton Trade: Throssle Doffer

That way, all similar trade occupations would be listed together, and you also retain the Thossle Doffer detail.

Thank-you for two excellent responses. Putting a generic name first is a good idea. I have to confess I had not seen or explored the 'Work with Data' option here, although I have done something similar with place names. There is so much to find and learn in this program, isn't there?

It's not answering your question, but of course the census analysts had the problem of how to standardise / group occupations.

The Dictionary of Occupational Terms Based on the Classification of Occupations used in the Census of Population, 1921 can be found on URL http://doot.spub.co.uk/intro.php. It's not an easy thing to read quickly (well, "impossible to read quickly" is more accurate) but people might find it useful. In particular, it summarises the various occupations so that if you go to the search page, and, e.g., enter the term sagger (as in the famous job of sagger-maker's bottom-knocker) you will find 6 occupations associated with the term sagger and simple definitions of them. Which can be important even if you don't want to summarise / standardise / group them.

The higher level classifications are probably not much help as the SM's BK is described as a 118—Other Skilled Workers (Order V. Bricks, Pottery, Glass), which isn't hugely helpful as it's not quite what you want to do, but the definitions might help.