Family Historian User Group

Probably another obvious one: if so, sorry. If I enter an event in one person's record (eg Became Vicar of Fishlake), it appears that this event then joins the list of available events in the pop-up window that appears when you ask to add an event IN ANY OTHER PERSON'S record. I have not used the event field very much, as I have chosen to enter most information about people in the Notes section, but should I wish to use the events section, I can see the list rapidly becoming enormous, with 7 or 8 events per person, about 800 records: thus about 6400 possible events in the pop-up list. Also, if I delete all instances of a note with a given title, I cannot seem to get it deleted from the list on the pop-up menu. For example, I made an imaginary event 'drunk Pernod for Breakfast' in one person's record, immediately deleted it, went to another person's record, pressed the button to add an event, and hey presto, there was 'drunk Pernod for Breakfast' listed as a possible option, along with birth, death, Vicar of Fishlake and the like. Surely I must be doing the wrong thing. I want the events of one person's life only to be listed in that person's record (when I press the button to add an event, I mean); and I would like to have the option of deleting it for good. One part of the help appears to say that the field should disappear when all instances of it in the field have been deleted, but I can't make this happen.

Thanks in advance for your advice.[tongue] Philip Wilson

ID:948

I don't think you are using events quite correctly. So for example became vicar of fish lake should be entered under occupation. The number of custom events I suspect for most people can be counted on one hand.

Remember both events and attibutes have dates and places and notes. One big problem with recording everything in one large note rather than in smaller notes attached to each event and attribute is that when sharing data it makes it much hardder for the other person to merge information.

Although as with everything else FH lets you do it the way you want.

Thanks, Jane.  Actually, I wanted to put 'Vicar of Fishlake' as an event (rather than occupation), because I wanted to give a chronology of events in the life of a churchman, which included the dates of various posts, moves, etc. Previously I had just done this in a note, as text, but wanted to try out marking each change of job, etc. as an 'event'.  However, I think I'll go back to using notes, as I can format my own text, rather than have preset texts which may or may not sound appropriate, though (as I mentioned in another string) I would love to be able to format text in notes.  

Thanks for the advice on long notes.

Philip Wilson

I also have a few custom events which I thought that I needed at the time that I created them.  As I become more familier with FH I found them superflous and so deleted the custom event in each individual's record and used a 'proper' FH event instead.

I can't find seem to be able to delete the custom event from the pick-list of events.

How do you achieve this? Thanks in anticipation

JOHN PATTERSON[confused]

They will 'disappear' once all references in your file are removed.

The easiest way to find any old ones is to write a custom queries selecting any 'not null' records for the event in question