* Death entries - marital status of deceased

[setait]

I've been quite happily entering the the marital status of the deceased in the second tab of the death form, but I've noticed that when I use the "widow" drop-down option for the "individual marriage status" this appears as "married to" when I automatically generate the source text using the Scottish source template (Ancestral Sources V4.5.0). Am I doing something wrong - or should I continue to edit the automatically generated text - or is this a glitch with the template?

Sheena

[tatewise]

It looks like the way that all the Death Templates are constructed.

The Individual Marriage Status has no effect on the Married to or equivalent section in any template.
You can enter anything: Single, Widowed, Divorced and it makes no difference.

If you enter a Spouse on the Family tab they appear in the Auto-text, otherwise in the Scottish Template it says Single regardless of the Individual Marriage Status.

As the AS Help says, Auto-text is only an approximate stab at the wording and usually needs amending.

It may be possible for you to redesign the Template to make use of the Individual Marriage Status using conditional code.

[NickWalker]

I've been quite happily entering the the marital status of the deceased in the second tab of the death form, but I've noticed that when I use the "widow" drop-down option for the "individual marriage status" this appears as "married to" when I automatically generate the source text using the Scottish source template (Ancestral Sources V4.5.0). Am I doing something wrong - or should I continue to edit the automatically generated text - or is this a glitch with the template?
Sheena

Hi Sheena

The template for England/Wales death certificate does include Widow/Widower if a spouse is included and marked as deceased but it looks like I forgot to include this on the Scottish template. I hadn't thought about referring to the Marital Status field but that's a good idea. You could edit the template (Tools->Autotext Template Editor) and replace the line that says:

=IF[{SPOUSE.ID}|Married to {SPOUSE.FULL}|Single]

with

=IF[{SPOUSE.ID}|=TITLE[=IF[{SPOUSE.DECEASED}|{KEYPERSON.GENDER.WIDOWERWIDOW}|{KEYPERSON.GENDER.HUSBANDWIFE}]] of {SPOUSE.FULL}|{KEYPERSON.MARITALSTATUS}]

If a spouse is included it will display either Husband/Wife or Widow/Widower depending on whether the deceased checkbox is ticked. If no spouse is selected then it refers to the marital status field instead.

The auto-text functions are quite powerful and I know that all the templates could be improved upon, I just find updating the templates to be quite a dull part of the development process so I don't spend as much time on this as I could. For example, I'll probably end up adding the support for births for the next version of AS quite quickly and then end up not releasing it for months because I won't be able to motivate myself to create the templates - these (and updating the help pages) are always my sticking points

Best wishes

Nick

[johnmorrisoniom]

Hi Nick,
Get it to beta quickly and the beta testers can do the templates for you, and possible help with suggestions for the help text

[setait]

Wow! Thanks very much Mike and Nick. Nick, I've only been using FH and AS since the New Year (I'm a TMG refugee) and didn't realise I could edit the templates. I'll give it a go. If I create some additional Scottish-focused templates for parish registers would the "auto" button in the "text" field pick them up?

Sheena

[tatewise]

Yes, you can give them a new name of your choosing, and they get added to the Auto-text drop-list.

If you wish, they can be added to the fhugdownloads:index|> Downloads and Links for the benefit of other users.