Family Historian User Group

I am trying to create a sentence template for the various facts that incorporate multiple (or plural) witnesses for a given role where one or both may be Name Only witness.
Presently I am working on the Will fact and have created a role "witness to will" to capture the names of witness(es) to the signature of will.
The portion of the sentence template for this role is:
<The witness to {individual's} signature was {role (single)=witness to will}. ><The witnesses to {individual's} signature were {role(plural)=witness to will}. >

If the "witnesses to will" witness(es) are individuals in the database it works fine, but if one or both are Name Only witnesses, the template fails. I assume this is because there is no "pop up window" to input multiple Name Only witnesses or to add a Name Only witness to the "pop up window" where Individuals witnesses are selected. I have not been able to find a way to designate the witness role as "multiple" other than the automatic designation that occurs when multiple individuals are selected for a given role.

I have searched through the KB and forum where I have found a number of posts about Name Only witnesses, but I did not see anything addressing multiple Name Only witness for a given role. The sample project has a number of Name Only witness examples, but again they are all singular. The only post I saw was regarding the creation of a query to list Name Only Individuals using %FACT.SHAN[1]% AND %FACT._SHAN[2]%, etc. but I struggled with getting these to work in the sentence so FH would know when to use the singular or plural option. Also struggled with how these could be combined if one witness was an Individual and one was Name Only.

The "simple" work around options I have determined thus far are:

• create individual records for Name Only witnesses. I am hesitant to create a number of individuals in the data base with no BMD facts which would contaminate any query results looking for ancestors with missing BMD facts. I am sure there are other problems I have yet to come across with having a number of individual records with no connection to the tree.
  create sentence templates where any witness roll I anticipate to include Name Only witness(es) - to be entered in the Name Only field as I want them to appear in the sentence. e.g. "was John Smith" or "were John Smith and Bill Jones". The downside to this is if one of the witness(es) is an individual record, I would not have the witness connection to the fact.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Curtis, your problem is nothing to do with Name Only witnesses, which work perfectly either singly or with other witnesses.
If you experiment with the predefined Will Witnesses of Executor or Heir you will see that they work OK.

I could not get your template to work for any type of witness whether linked to Individuals or Name Only.
They always displayed the {role(...)=witness to will} code under all conditions.

The problem is the use of the {individual's} code within conditional < angle brackets > and is a common mistake.
Those conditional brackets only support one enclosed {code} to act as the condition.
But you have the two codes {individual's} and {role(...)=witness to will} which confuses things and fails.

So you must reword those conditional phrases to not use the {individual's} code and all will be OK.
I am not aware of any other solution.
Sometimes, {=CombineText(...)} can offer a solution but not in this case because the {role(...)=witness to will} code is not supported within functions such as {=CombineText(...)}, etc.

Thanks Mike,
Just getting back to some data entry after setting aside the genealogy for a bit.