Family Historian User Group

Is there any way of getting AS to not create two facts when entering an occupation on the census input screen please? I'd rather there was one fact that simply says what their occupation was with the rest of the details for that particular census entry.

The main reason for this is that I don't like the way it displays on the reports with two facts.

Thanks

NickiP

No that's not possible and in my opinion not really desirable either. Just because a report doesn't produce the results you want is never a good reason to not record information. The key thing is to make sure you're recording the facts. The place/address associated with an occupation is meant to be used to record where they worked. A census fact is meant to record where they were on census night (not necessarily where they lived). You can always select the option to not show census facts as part of a report if you wanted to.

To be honest if all you're doing is recording occupations you probably won't get any benefit from using Ancestral Sources and you might as well just enter your census data directly into Family Historian.

It is possible to do that, but if you find other documented evidence about Occupations that you record as Occupation Attributes, then the Individual will have an incomplete Occupation history, because some details will be 'hidden' in Census Events.

I assume it is Narrative Reports that you don't like. In FH V6, the Narrative Sentence Templates are far more powerful. So I believe you could customise them for the case of a Census Event and Occupation Attribute with same Date. It should be possible to create one sentence in that case, but retain the standard sentences for independent Census Events and Occupation Attributes.

The alternative way to achieve what you ask for is to customise the Census Templates in AS.
Use Census > Census Templates and work through each relevant Country and Year.
In each one click Copy at bottom, then change the Country slightly, re-enter the Year, and click New and Paste.
You are now designing a new custom template copy & pasted from the default template.
Select the Profession or Occupation item on the left and change its Column Type to Generic.
Then in Recording at the bottom select Append to census event local note and untick Record even if no data entered.
Finally Save this custom template, and repeat for the next template.

Just to clarify that Mike's answer seems to contradict mine, but I understood your question to mean was it possible to just create an occupation but without a census fact and that is indeed not possible. If that isn't what you meant then Mike's answer covers it.

Thanks Mike and Nick for your replies.

To clarify I don't just want to record occupations without other Census information, such as residence, I wanted to include the occupation attribute with the Census fact including the residence they are at on that particular date, rather than having a separate fact for the occupation. I had noticed that multiple occupations overwrite the occupation facts, so perhaps it won't really do what I'd like.

I really don't like the way it shows in the reports layouts and as I use these for sending to relatives, it's important to me how it looks. I accept I could exclude the Census facts from the reports, but in some ways that tends to remove the need to include the information in FH anyway.

I suspect I shall end up resorting to manually adding notes on the information for each individual but I've have some very large trees and this will be very time consuming. I've saved over the years all the census information, just never entered it in the various software I was using at the time because I never have liked the way it displays in reports.

It wouldn't be so much of an issue for me if I could retain the Census information (imported from ancestry directly) in my localised TNG website, but because I update by importing from FH, I lose the links to the census entries. I shall have to see if I can work out how to save the specific table entries for the Census information for individuals in MySQL (assuming its possible, I don't know) and then restore after an update. It may then allow me to store the information in TNG. There isn't much point me entering it in FH and then exporting to TNG if the occupation and residence on Census are in multiple facts as it's not going to display the way I would like. Granted that using notes isn't going to resolve the issue, but at least it will display more to my liking.

I'll have a look a the custom templates suggestion for FH but when I've looked previously I've not managed to get the occupation attribute to display as extra in the Census fact template in FH anyway.

I would like to respond to some of your points in reverse order.

As you say, the current FH V5 fact sentence templates cannot amalgamate details from separate facts.
But in FH V6 fact sentence templates can use all the Data Reference and Function expressions.
So in FH V6 I think it is feasible to design a template that amalgamates details from say a Census Event and Occupation Attribute into one sentence, perhaps on the condition that they share the same Date, otherwise a separate sentence applies for each fact.

If the FH Narrative Report sentence layout can be customised to your satisfaction, does that obviate the TNG & MySQL complications, and allow the default AS entry of separate Census Events and Occupation Attributes?

You said "I had noticed that multiple occupations overwrite the occupation facts".
I do not understand what you mean. Multiple occupations are recorded in multiple instances of the Occupation Attribute in the same way as multiple Residence Attributes and multiple Census Events.
Unless perhaps you are being misled by the Occupation field on the Main tab of the Property Box, which by default only shows the first instance of all the Occupation Attributes, but can be customised to show more instances if required.