Ships Passengers

oldtimer47 · Post by **oldtimer47** » 12 Dec 2009 22:07

Hello

Does anyone have any tips on recording people who travelled back and forth by ship many times between 2 countries. I started off by using a pair of Emigrated and Immigrated events for each journey but realised that isn't what was going on. Just one of those journeys was the actual emigration, the others were visits.

I guess I'm looking for advice on a custom event along the lines of 'Travelled Between' or 'Passenger on Ship' but the difficulty with these is getting a sensible sentence in the narrative.

Has anyone else had this problem and got a solution ?

Many Thanks
Peter

ID:4225

Post by **nsw** » 12 Dec 2009 22:25

Personally I record this as a residence event on board the ship with the start and end dates as date range. So, for example, if I have a soldier who left Bombay for Portsmouth I have 3 residence events, for the day he left Bombay, for the time onboard the ship and for the day arrived in Portsmouth.

oldtimer47 · Post by **oldtimer47** » 13 Dec 2009 08:23

I've been reading the Help File [mad] and discover that the Emigrated and Immigrated facts are the only ones that support a structure of 'from place1 to place2'.

I can see how to add a custom fact but they do not have this structure. Is there any way to 'clone' the Emigrated fact as a custom fact that can then be edited ?

If not I guess I will use the Emigrated fact for the actual change and the Residence fact(thanks Nick!) for the time on board ship.

Related to this - is there a risk of making the Gedcom file harder to understand by using custom facts ?

Peter

JonAxtell · Post by **JonAxtell** » 13 Dec 2009 13:18

oldtimer47 said:
Related to this - is there a risk of making the Gedcom file harder to understand by using custom facts ?

Not really. Gedcom files aren't designed to be normally read by a human. The format was designed to be human readable to allow small files to be created manually as access to genealogy software was not common in the 80's. It also meant that if it came to the worst, the data could still be extracted (with great difficulty) by hand, or some software written to extract the data.

The only thing with adding custom facts is that if you came to share your Gedcom with other genealogists using other software packages, they won't necessarily be able to use your facts. Just because the custom facts follow the standard doesn't mean that other packages will be able to recognise them. If you don't share your Gedcom (or you share your data in other ways such as narrative reports) then it doesn't matter one jot what you do with your custom facts.

This is the difference between having a storage format and a transfer format. The structure of a storage format is only important to the program that uses it - the program can present the data how ever it likes which makes the most sense to the user. The structure of a transfer format needs to be recognised by all users, needs to be published, and followed by all.

If only a subset of the format is used by the majority then it doesn't matter if a program follows it 100% (or 99%), if all the others only follow it 70% then that single program has wasted effort for no purpose at all as that 30% of data will not be recognised and will be lost in the transfer.

MDJackson · Post by **MDJackson** » 13 Dec 2009 22:25

Hi Peter
I have newly uploaded a Travel fact set.
This is my answer to recording travel events as distinct from emigration. Because only the emigration event has 'from' and 'to' fields I use the travel events in pairs.
There are 'sailed from' and 'flew from' events and a 'disembarked' event to record arrival with either mode of transport. There is also a border crossing event as I have one person who was recorded entering the USA from Canada.
I have played around with the sentence text and think that it reads reasonably well in reports etc.

Regards
Malcolm

oldtimer47 · Post by **oldtimer47** » 14 Dec 2009 08:05

Malcolm

I think you have just completed my journey for me! I was starting to use 'Ships Passenger' as a custom event but your approach is much easier to follow in the narrative. I also have a 'Border Crossing' so that's solved as well.

I have a couple of dozen people that need this and I have been trying things on the first few - so not too many changes to make!

Thanks again, Peter

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