Witness and Role in “Special” Events
Posted: 06 Jan 2022 09:14
Sorry this is long, and if this has been suggested before – a couple of quick searches came up with nothing, but it’s hard to find suitable search terms! Let alone a title for this post.
For me, FH Witnesses/Roles are one of the most useful and far-reaching data structure innovations since FH Version 3 (and, as an aside, there is scope for extension one day).
A perfect example is for a person’s birth where we can now add witnesses like midwife (and any other significant person) for the birth itself, or whoever was the informant at the birth registration.
Marriages can be an even richer field for making links – not just the “witnesses” themselves and celebrant (if that direction floats your boat), but best man, bridesmaids, etc, when these are known.
Although there is the option to store witness names, I really do prefer to enter them as Individual records. That probably has many potential benefits, but obviously:
Well, there’s nothing new here, so far, but here is a scenario.
I had several relatives at the Battle of Trafalgar, being the Place of Death in one case, but needing a custom event “Fought at” (which may have been technically incorrect, never mind) for others.
Very probably, other users have created umpteen custom events for all kinds of participation in the World Wars (though I haven’t made that a priority or looked at examples in members’ postings).
What pained me before was the serious difficulty identifying all tree Individuals involved (in any way) in WW1 for example. Perhaps Witness is the solution?
Here is a trick.
Suppose we had an Event (somewhere) called “WW1”… then all we have to do is add, as witnesses to that event, everyone in turn (from out “homework assignment” list of relevant Individuals), adding a suitable new role or picking from those already used.
One attraction for me is that we do not have to have any specific WW1-related event or attribute created for the individual concerned. Indeed, their list of roles as witnesses can be a motivation to add suitable facts later.
The outstanding question is where to create the “WW1” event in the first place. After all, GEDCOM (and so FH) has no way to create what you might call unrelated, floating, disembodied or global Events (and my fuzzy vision of a new-age GEDCOM does include that notion). So, what we need is the key trick…
The details don’t matter too much but create an unrelated Individual “[no forename] GLOBAL” (no facts needed) then add one child for each global event needed – start with “WW1 GLOBAL”, for example.
Create a new event-type Fact called "World War 1" (or similar) and add one to that child of GLOBAL. N.B. don’t mess with “WW1 GLOBAL” by adding any more events.
Optionally, add event date (or span) and place (though something like “Global” would be better in this example), with any useful extras (notes and media could well be attractive in some other examples).
Done. Now add witnesses as needed.
A couple of suggestions to help keep these global individuals and associated facts visually distinct from others:
For me, FH Witnesses/Roles are one of the most useful and far-reaching data structure innovations since FH Version 3 (and, as an aside, there is scope for extension one day).
A perfect example is for a person’s birth where we can now add witnesses like midwife (and any other significant person) for the birth itself, or whoever was the informant at the birth registration.
Marriages can be an even richer field for making links – not just the “witnesses” themselves and celebrant (if that direction floats your boat), but best man, bridesmaids, etc, when these are known.
Although there is the option to store witness names, I really do prefer to enter them as Individual records. That probably has many potential benefits, but obviously:
- it’s the only way to enter additional information about that person, if anything is known, and
- it may turn out later the same name crops up in another witness context, so the link is made explicitly (even if there is uncertainty about the shared identity, that can be recorded), and
- it may often turn out that a witness is related in the tree somewhere (and we won’t necessarily remember we had them somewhere else as a witness (and make the necessary changes).
Well, there’s nothing new here, so far, but here is a scenario.
I had several relatives at the Battle of Trafalgar, being the Place of Death in one case, but needing a custom event “Fought at” (which may have been technically incorrect, never mind) for others.
Very probably, other users have created umpteen custom events for all kinds of participation in the World Wars (though I haven’t made that a priority or looked at examples in members’ postings).
What pained me before was the serious difficulty identifying all tree Individuals involved (in any way) in WW1 for example. Perhaps Witness is the solution?
Here is a trick.
Suppose we had an Event (somewhere) called “WW1”… then all we have to do is add, as witnesses to that event, everyone in turn (from out “homework assignment” list of relevant Individuals), adding a suitable new role or picking from those already used.
One attraction for me is that we do not have to have any specific WW1-related event or attribute created for the individual concerned. Indeed, their list of roles as witnesses can be a motivation to add suitable facts later.
The outstanding question is where to create the “WW1” event in the first place. After all, GEDCOM (and so FH) has no way to create what you might call unrelated, floating, disembodied or global Events (and my fuzzy vision of a new-age GEDCOM does include that notion). So, what we need is the key trick…
The details don’t matter too much but create an unrelated Individual “[no forename] GLOBAL” (no facts needed) then add one child for each global event needed – start with “WW1 GLOBAL”, for example.
Create a new event-type Fact called "World War 1" (or similar) and add one to that child of GLOBAL. N.B. don’t mess with “WW1 GLOBAL” by adding any more events.
Optionally, add event date (or span) and place (though something like “Global” would be better in this example), with any useful extras (notes and media could well be attractive in some other examples).
Done. Now add witnesses as needed.
A couple of suggestions to help keep these global individuals and associated facts visually distinct from others:
- prefix global individual surnames with something like “!” so they sort in a group at the top of the list (or find something to group them at the end, and let me know), and
- prefix global event names with something legal(!) like “_” (underscore) for the same reason.