Family Historian User Group

Anyone come across this weird behaviour before?
In the property box, for an individual, when I highlight either the 1851 or 1861 census facts, only the down arrow is enabled, and for the 1851 & 1861 Occupation facts, only the Up arrow is enabled!
With all other facts, neither arrow is enabled.

Move to another individual and similar happens, but for different facts.

Closing/Re-opening property box to refresh screen seems to make no difference!

NBSupport ticket 429594 raised

On the fact tab you can not move dated events out of sequence. So you can either have the occupation before or after the census for the same date so in your example the 1851 Occupation can not be moved after the 1861 Census so the down arrow is disabled.

So any Fact with a unique Date cannot be moved up or down.
In addition, a Fact cannot be moved out of its Normal Time Frame, so undated Facts can only be moved a limited amount.
e.g. A 'Life' Fact cannot be moved up past a 'Birth' Fact or down past a 'Death' Fact.

You can override those restrictions via the All tab.

Jane wrote: ↑

27 Sep 2021 08:20

On the fact tab you can not move dated events out of sequence. So you can either have the occupation before or after the census for the same date so in your example the 1851 Occupation can not be moved after the 1861 Census so the down arrow is disabled.

Jane & Miketate, I am aware that some work was done in this area, so that facts automatically sort, but it doesn't explain why neither 1881 nor 1911 pair of facts have no arrows, yet the 1851 & 1861 pairs do!

Your explanations explain why I am only seeing 1 arrow, but don't explain why I am seeing no arrow

I am not seeing that problem at all, all my Census "paired" facts can be reordered as I would expect.

The Facts tab automatically displays Facts in their Date order by default regardless of their database order.
However, that fools many users into thinking the database GEDCOM holds the Facts in that chronological order.
If they are not chronological FH prevents them from being moved up/down on the Facts tab.
I suspect it assumes that they are not chronological for a reason and so should not be disturbed.

Have you sorted those Facts in the GEDCOM database by using the various auto-sort options?
See Sorting Children, Spouses & Facts into Date Order.

Before doing that, you will discover that the 1881 and 1911 pairs of Facts are not in Date order on the All tab.
i.e. You did not add them to the database in chronological order.
After sorting they will be in Date order on the All tab and the Facts tab up/down arrows will be active.

Miketate,

1. I haven't used any autosort to re-order facts
2. the 1881 pair of facts, that don't show any arrows, did show up as 'out of sequence' on All tab.
3. After Sorting the out-of-order data on All Tab, the 1881 pair of facts now correctly show the Arrows

I am curious how the items could get out-of-sequence on the All Tab, as it seems it now autocorrects itself under FH7.0.8.2. (presumably they were added before the upgrade?)

There is definitely something amiss in this area, as seen in the following sequence
1. I deliberately altered a pair of 1911 facts so they were out-of-sequnce on the All Tab, and the Arrow disappeared from the Facts Tab.
2. I then then auto-sorted All Tab, still no Arrow on Facts Tab.
3. I then manually moved one of the pair via the All tab to put them in sequence, and Arrow re-appeared on Facts Tab

Obviously a lot more going on behind the scenes than we first thought

You don't have to display the All tab to use the auto-sorting commands, but it does make the changes more obvious.

FH does not spontaneously alter the order of Facts in the GEDCOM database.
There is the Tools > Preferences > File Load/Save option to 'Check date order of spouses, children & facts on import'.
But that only applies to GEDCOM imported to a new Project.
I am not aware of the auto-sort commands having been changed in FH v7.0.

Otherwise, assuming you have not moved the Facts up/down on the All tab, the most likely explanation is you did not enter those facts chronologically, e.g. the 1881 and 1911 Census events were entered first and the 1881 and 1911 Occupation facts were entered later. The out-of-sequence order they appear in the All tab provides clues to their order of entry.

Sometimes when data is altered on one display FH does not immediately update a related display.
I suspect in this case if you had switched Property Box and returned, then the Facts tab arrows would have behaved.

tatewise wrote: ↑

27 Sep 2021 12:54

the most likely explanation is you did not enter those facts chronologically, e.g. the 1881 and 1911 Census events were entered first and the 1881 and 1911 Occupation facts were entered later. The out-of-sequence order they appear in the All tab provides clues to their order of

That may well be true, but It would appear that this can no longer happen, as you can no longer get new items to appear in the All tab out of sequence. Regardless of which order you add them, they get correctly re-ordered by date.
I just added some facts out of sequence, yet they still showed in correct order in both All and Facts Tab. I assume this is a conseqqence of the changes made in this area to FH7.0.8.2

In Tools>Preferences>General>Advanced there is an option (ticked by default, I think) to Enable automatic ordering of events/attributes by date. This is what the Help file says:

I can't remember if this is new to V7, but it does confirm that if facts are entered via the Property Box they will be kept in chronological order.

However, I'm not sure if this applies to facts created by Ancestral Sources. So if you added your census events and related facts via AS they might still be out of order in the Gedcom.

You are correct. I wonder when that feature was added. It is certainly helpful.
There is no mention in https://www.family-historian.co.uk/v7-updates.
That option in the Advanced page has a similar Help page in FH v6.2.7 so it must have existed for years!
The Ancestral Sources effect may be the explanation, because that updates the GEDCOM directly.

Enties added by AS are appended to the gedcom file, but will still appear in the correct order on the facts tab, just out of order on the All tab.
For this reason I periodically choose to re sort all facts, or choose F9 for an individual.

The auto sort feature of the property box was, I Think, added with V4 and Projects

I don't think AS appends Facts to the GEDCOM file as a whole, but to the Individual record, which is I suspect what you meant, and will cause the out-of-sequence scenario.