* Sentence construction

[Mike Davies]

Hi All please can anyone help?
When I publish a narrative report of an individual there is a lot of repetitive sentences particularly with a census report

Sentence example.JPG (36.18 KiB) Viewed 3241 times

Is there any way to combine the three sentences and add who they were living with and the relationship.

[tatewise]

One thing that would help is to not add Residence facts as well as Census events because the Census event says it all. I suspect you are using AS and have ticked the options to use both which is usually not advisable.

To add who they were living with requires Fact Witnesses to be added to the Census event but including the relationship is a challenge. See Sentence structures (17789) that is attempting the same.

Merging sentences is sometimes possible but is an advanced feature that involves the Sentence Template of one fact checking data in another fact. For example, it might be possible for the Occupation fact Sentence Template to exclude the Date part if there is a Census event with the same Date.
e.g.
{=TextIf( GetFieldText( %CUR_PRIN%, "%INDI.CENS[year=" . %FACT.DATE:YEAR% . "].DATE%" ) = Text( %FACT.DATE% ), "", Text( "On " . %FACT.DATE%) )} {individual} was {a/an value}< at {address}> {place} {age}

That is made up as follows:
{=TextIf( CensusDate = OccupationDate, "", Text( "On " . %FACT.DATE%) )}
if Census & Occupation dates match display nothing, otherwise display On Fact Date.
So in your example it would just say He was a Baker's Assistant in Bath.

GetFieldText( %CUR_PRIN%, "%INDI.CENS[year=" . %FACT.DATE:YEAR% . "].DATE%" ) gets Census event Date.
i.e. get the current principal's Census with the same year as current Occupation and supply its Date.

Text( %FACT.DATE% ) gets current Occupation fact Date.

[jbtapscott]

If, as Mike suggests, you are using AS to capture the census details, then another option is to modify the AS template for the census records such that some data is recorded in the Note on the Census fact. I don't use the Residence Fact or the Occupation Fact when recording data from Census records. For example, I get the sentence "She appeared in the Census on 5th April 1901 at 155 Shirland Road in Paddington, London, England. Relationship to Head of Household: Daughter, Marital Status: Single, Occupation: Children's Nurse" on narrative reports.

[Mike Davies]

Thanks both for your replies,
Yes I do use AS and have ticked the census and residence fact box. The sentence that Brent has shown is perfectly acceptable for me. Will it generate automatically just by ticking only the census fact box? I suspect not.
Thanks
Mike

[tatewise]

Brent will no doubt explain the details, but I think it needs a significant edit of the AS Census Templates for every Year.

It also will not apply retrospectively to all your existing Census events.

There will need to be a small change to the Census event Sentence Template to include the {note} field.

A tip that has been given here many times is to check the style of Reports you expect to produce before committing too much data to your Project.

[jbtapscott]

Yes, as Mike suggests it does need an edit of each years templates, but that's a once-off job and does not really take too long.

In essence, open the respective years template, select the Census Column, change the Column Type to "Generic" and Recording to "Append to census event local note". I have attached screenshot of my change for Marital Status in the 1891 UK Census.

[Mike Davies]

Thanks Both I'll experiment with all the info that you've supplied but is it my understanding that this will not be retrospective to the 5000 plus individuals that are in my tree?

[tatewise]

Correct.

[NickWalker]

It is also worth mentioning that a new version of Ancestral Sources will be out very soon and this will make significant changes to the census templates so I'd suggest not making any major alterations yet.