* Residence

[GeneSniper]

Hi All

Is there any advantage/disadvantage to grouping residences. By that I mean, say I stayed in a house for 20yrs and I had the residence as from/to for those 20yrs, in that time there were 3 births, a death and wedding and I was involved in some way in them all. I would have 5 sources for all of them and was going to cite the residence is there a problem using the one residence or would it be better to have 5 separate residences and dates? Which ways best?

[AdrianBruce]

I tend to create a single fact with a date range when I'm getting several repeats of the "same" place and address - it simplifies the data by removing the repeats in favour of a single fact.

That said, if the repeat covers a considerable amount of time, then I find I sometimes can't see the current residence at some point because it's futher back inside a date range fact.

[GeneSniper]

Adrian,

When I tried this, I found the problem with the residence being back with a g/grand father who stayed in the same house all his married life and had a large family.

Thanks for that

[NickWalker]

Personally I like to have separate residences because it helps me to see all the various 'snapshots' in time for each time a source indicated to me that the person was living in that location. If I combined a lot of residences into one and have all the various citations link to that residence and then came across another record that showed they lived elsewhere for some time in the middle of that period I'd then have to split the residences again (into two) and then separate out the citations again. The downside to having multiple residences is that it can make reports seem very repetitive, but this is something that I'd rather was solved by improvements to reporting rather than having to change the way the data is recorded. It seems to me that it wouldn't be particularly difficult for a narrative report to see that all the residence records over a period of time are for the same location and combine them into a sentence such as 'between 1st May 1842 and 7th April 1898' she was living at...'. I'd like the reporting to be much smarter generally so it could say things like 'from 1st May 1842 until her death she was living at...'.

[GeneSniper]

Thanks for that Nick, these were the things I was wondering. You should maybe put it in the wish list for FH13 and Calico Pie will put it in their Room 101.

[AdrianBruce]

... It seems to me that it wouldn't be particularly difficult for a narrative report to see that all the residence records over a period of time are for the same location and combine them into a sentence such as 'between 1st May 1842 and 7th April 1898' she was living at...'. ...

That would be good - provided between the computer logic and my brain, I could work out how the respective notes would combine. It may be that just concatenating would suffice...

[NickWalker]

As with all these things, it probably isn't quite as easy as it might first appear, such as the different ways people record places and addresses may make it difficult for these duplicate residences to be automatically combined in all cases, but I'm sure this could be dealt with via options that the user could configure. Narrative reports seem to be a popular way to produce reports and I expect some investment of CP's time in making the reports less repetitive would be welcomed.

[NickWalker]

By the way if this idea of having the narrative report automatically combining events such as residence is of interest there is a wish list item that you could vote for: Wish List 275: Combined events in narrative reports. It has been in the wish list for over 16 years so is surely overdue.

[RS3100]

In instances where I have multiple occurrences of the same residence or occupation etc., I suppress the fact sentences for all but one of them - usually the first occurrence - and edit the fact sentence for the remaining one to describe the from and to dates. That way, I still have an easy way to see and find the individual facts and associated sources for each occurrence of the fact, within the property box, but it removes the repetition in narrative reports by summarising them in a single sentence.

In FH7 it's even possible to edit the remaining fact sentence to simply consist of "{note}" and create a note containing the text you desire, in or after which you can insert references to the sources for every occurrence of the address or occupation using the text editor. Or simply copy the citations from the suppressed facts to the remaining "summary" fact.

[tatewise]

As a Wish List comment and RS3100 say, it is possible to use Sentence Templates to inhibit some fact sentences and redefine a summary sentence, but any Source Citations for inhibited {blank} sentences must be rearranged otherwise they will not appear in the Narrative Report.

[Jean001]

I record separate residences, keeping each piece of information in its 'dated' place.

However, also I have a custom fact (Res List) in which is listed in the Note, in date order, all the residences of an individual, including place of birth, death and burial.

Some duplication of information and effort I know; to me the benefits outweigh the extra time and effort. I started to do this before I used any genealogy/family history software so it is quick to add any new information to each list.

I do the same for occupations.