Family Historian User Group

Hi all, another recent convert from TMG here, with a census question: is there a straightforward way to create a sentence that will list the subject within his or her household context (ie will list all the people they were living with)?

In TMG, I had a single census tag for each household, with the parents as principals and everyone else as witnesses. My TMG sentence for Frederick MAGGS who appears in the witness role of ’son’ has transferred into FH like this:

He appears living with his parents John MAGGS and Jane CLAYTON in the 1861 census in Kingswood, Gloucestershire < along with [WO]>.

[WO] has not been translated during the input to FH. In TMG, it refers to Other Witnesses, so the whole sentence lists all people within the household apart from Frederick himself.

It seems from the FH help file that I might be able to construct something with the sentence code {role=____} , BUT the Knowledgebase (https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/recor ... sus-record) says that it’s best to maintain a separate census event for each person, all linked to a common source. That’s fine, I’m using Method 1, and I can use Give Witnesses Their Own Facts to make that change.

But won’t keeping all census events essentially separate make it impossible to refer to the rest of the household in narrative reports? The only options I can think of are to type out all the names manually each time, or to maintain a duplicate TMG-like census event with witnesses solely to make use of {role=____} in sentences, while at the same time including separate census events so that I can use Census Reports and the Lookup Missing Census Facts plugin.

Am I missing something? Any guidance would be appreciated.

Michael

Welcome to the FHUG Michael.

Essentially, your analysis is correct. To get the best of all features you will need a standard Census event for each household member and the head of household (i.e. Principal) will need Fact Witnesses with Roles for all the other members too.
I think you may also need to be creative with the Sentence Templates to avoid duplicate sentences for household members who have their own Census event and are also a Fact Witness.

There was a similar discussion recently but I cannot find it just now.

Let us focus on the imported sentence: He appears living with his parents John MAGGS and Jane CLAYTON in the 1861 census in Kingswood, Gloucestershire < along with [WO]>.
I presume that must be a specific Witness Sentence Template local to Frederick MAGGS because in the general case it cannot be assumed that a person will be living with both their parents at a census.
To repeat that in future, new Census entries will need such a Template to be manually entered for each Witness person.

The alternative of a generic default Template cannot use the word 'parents' unconditionally, and would need to refer to the Head of Household (i.e. Principal) and optionally a Witness with the Role of Wife, along with optionally any other Witness Roles to include other household members.
See Narrative Report Fact Sentence Templates for background details and then come back with any questions.

Many thanks Mike. At least I know I'm on the right track. I'll do some tests next.

I have quickly experimented with the Census event having Witness Roles of Wife and Resident.

The default Sentence Template is shown below but will need supplementing with optional components for the Roles:
{individual} appeared in the Census {date} residing {place} {age}

The default Witness Sentence Template for the Role of Resident is:
{individual} appears living with {%CUR_PRIN%}< and {other=wife}><, along with {other=resident}>

A member of the household, other than the Principal or Wife, with a Role of Resident, produces the narrative:
"He appeared in the Census on 7 April 1861 residing in Kingswood, Gloucestershire. Frederick appears living with John MAGGS and Jane CLAYTON, along with Michael MAGGS and Thomas MAGGS."

I hope that helps.

In TMG I had a large number of witness roles to generate slightly different sentences each time, such as "Son with parents", "Son with mother", "Son with father" etc. But the number of possibilities quickly spiralled out of control, and in FH I'll just use 'resident" as you suggest, perhaps with "lodger" or similar for non-family people.

Thanks so much for your help, it was exactly what I was looking for!

Don't forget you can always override any specific witness sentence so you can manually adjust any sentence should you want to say for example.

He was a servant in the household of James Smith, his future father in law.

Yes, thanks. I'll definitely be doing that as well.

For future reference, just adding a link to Using selected Text from Source in sentence templates here.