Family Historian User Group

One of my 2x Great Grandfathers was a criminal. I want to show the details in Reports. How would you build the event/attribute.

The infomation I have is;

The date of crime.
The date of trial.
The crime and trail procedings.
The names of the people affected by the crime.
The length of prison sentence.
The name of the Prison.

Have made a couple of attempts but the end results have not been very good. Terrible in fact. [frown]

ID:4601

First off think about why you really need the event/attribute.

Events and attributes are useful when you have a lot of occurances of them and you can then use queries to find them, manipulate them, manage them. They are pretty limiting in the amount of information they can hold as they have a very limited structure.

If you're creating the event purely to use it in a report for one or a few people the amount of effort involved in creating it, tweaking the sentence structure, etc. will be out of proportion to just writing a bit of narrative in a note and including it in reports. Plus with the amount of details you want, you'll still need to use a note field to hold all the details.

If you're creating the event so you can keep track of your criminal ancestors then creating an simple event which contains the basic details (date of trial, charge, result) would work well.

I'd echo Jon's advice about keeping it simple. I started off by creating custom events for every occasion, and the list got longer and longer and ever more arcane, because nobody ever has quite the same experience twice. Eventually I scrapped the lot and created one custom event (called 'Event') and one custom attribute (called 'Attribute'). The template reads {date} {note} {place}, and I can put what I like in the note to make a readable sentence. Now I don't ever have to think about how to describe an event or whether it would fit into a pre-existing category - 'Event' covers everything!

Maureen

Thanks for your replies.I think I'll take a bit from each of your posts.

My 2x Great Grandfathers had a thing about appearing at the Bailey. I've got another 2 who were witnesses in different cases. All around the first half of the 19th centuary.

And to cap it all I did one of my Jury services there as well.