* Royal Navy Ranks

[DavidJChilds]

Could someone please tell me how military ranks or Navy ratings should be recorded in Family Historian 7. Do I record each promotion as an occupation for instance, i.e. Petty Office and the date of promotion?
Any advice would be appreciated, thank you...

[tatewise]

Belated welcome to the FHUG David.

There is the FHUG Knowledge Base > Downloads/Plugins > Downloads > Fact Sets > Military History that provides many useful custom facts that include Military Rank and Promotion.

However, some users don't record such specific details but just add descriptive Notes to a Military Service biography.

[DavidJChilds]

Thank you Mike, I will have a look at both options.

[AdrianBruce]

Several options David, as you've worked out and Mike has said.

My view would be that it very much depends on what you want to do with your data. Having an occupation of "Petty Officer", with a start date set to the promotion date, is perfectly feasible if you just have a couple of guys with that sort of data. However, if you ever want to run off queries on your military or naval folks, it would be very difficult to select the relevant occupation values for identifying those people - that's when things like a Military Service attribute from that Fact Set come in useful because you'd just pull off people with that attribute. (I'm saying that without thinking the different possible queries through, mind you!)

Now, while I am a great enthusiast for recording military stories, I use very few events and attributes - mostly I just have the Military Service attributes, one for each regiment the chap was in (say), and write the rest up as text in the Note for the Military Service attribute - effectively, a bit of biography, as Milke suggests. That means that I can't do queries on things like ranks or when people were wounded, however, so far I've found no reason to do those sorts of things. But frankly, if I tried to enter a specific fact for every time my GG-Uncle was temporarily promoted and then reverted, I wouldn't be able to see the wood for the trees. (He was in Mesopotamia during WW1 and, as a corporal, got temporarily boosted to sergeant and then back every time someone above him went into hospital. Which was quite often in those conditions. I think I've just written it up as "Between X and Y he had several temporary promotions until finally...")

[DavidJChilds]

Thank you Adrian, both answers make a lot of sense. I am trying to enter data to produce a book in the FH7 software. My great grandfather spent a good deal of his life in the navy from a 16 boy and eventually became Chief Petty Officer. He was involved with submarines in the early days and when he left the navy he became involved with HM underwater Detection Establishment in Weymouth & Portland, Dorset. I would just like to tell the story of his long naval career by using the data to produce the wording. It seems like writing up a short biography in the Military Service Attribute does what is required. I have run a test individual report and I am satisfied that this will produce what I am trying to achieve.