* Witness role exported to TNG

[jclifford]

I am using the Witness Fact mainly for wills but I think my "problem" applies to other facts with witnesses.

In FH I enter a summary of the will in the Note field of the Principal's Fact. When exported to TNG this works well for the Principal but the Individual page in TNG for each Witness contains the whole of the will and a list of all the Witnesses. I feel this overloads the page, especially when a person has been a beneficiary, witness or overseer of numerous wills. I am attaching an example screenshot (poor quality because I had to reduce the file size).

I would prefer to have just the Witness Fact title or sentence showing in /exported to TNG without the Principal's Fact Note and without the list of other witnesses.

Is it possible to achieve this? I tried ticking the option in the plugin for Witness Role 2_SHAN but this does not seem to have any effect.

[tatewise]

There are no current options in the Plugin to achieve what you request.

FH Witnesses is a non-standard Gedcom feature, not supported in most other products, so it is important to understand the consequences when migrating to other products such as TNG. There are pros and cons.

In FH for Thomas Hulbert of Nethermore, his Facts tab lists those Witnessed Will facts with all the fields from the Principal Will fact, including the Note field, and via the Witnesses option lists all the Witnesses.
The Plugin does its best to mimic that with minimal loss of information, so it provides all those fields in each Will Role fact, and lists all the Witnesses.

Usually, details such as a Will Transcript should be placed in the Source Citation in a Text From Source field, with related notes in an associated Note field. That would significantly reduce the text in the Will Role fact Note field.

If the Witness Roles were not listed, how would you discover who they were?

I suspect the example of Thomas Hulbert of Nethermore is an extreme case that is unlikely elsewhere.
I imagine it would be a simple task to manually delete the Note text you do not require.

[jclifford]

Thank you for the suggestion about using the text from source field. I will try it out. I got into the habit of using the Event Note field while using Legacy where the source text is several clicks away from the Event details - I can see that it would be easier to use in FH.

You say "If the Witness Roles were not listed, how would you discover who they were?". My assumption was that someone looking at the Individual page for a witness would see the name of the Principal and their relationship, if any, from the Witness Fact title (e.g. "Beneficiary and grandchild in will of Thomas Hulbert") and only a few would want or need to see the details of the will or other witnesses and they could do this by looking at the Principal's record. But this would involve a search unless I could add some clever html to the Role definition to provide a clickable link.

Thomas is not that rare in my one-name study in having four witness roles and I have some people with five or six.

[jclifford]

I have written a small programme to edit the gedcom file produced by the plugin which has given me mostly what I want (see attachment for same person as my previous post). The file concerned has 3,291 individuals and 951 witness role events so would be very laborious to edit by hand; the file size has reduced from 2.5MB to 1.4MB.
I would have liked to make clickable the ID numbers for the Principal in each Witness Role Event, but I don't know how to do that.

[tatewise]

You cannot make ID clickable in Gedcom file in a Note field.
You would need to go via the Source Citation and find all Individuals/Facts that cite it.
This is one of the portability drawbacks of a custom feature such as Witnesses.
The Gedcom feature that offers links between unrelated people is Associated Person, that is poorly supported by many products, but is OK in TNG. However, it would be tricky to map Witnesses onto Associated Persons.

[Jane]

Witnesses are supported by several programs, so it might be worth requesting support from the author of TNG, or look at customising the TNG import and display to support them fully.

[Shelley]

It sounds like jcliffard and I are trying to achieve much the same thing with witnesses on our TNG pages. See Witness Sentence thread.

For my own use, I've modified Mike's Give Witnesses Their Own Facts plugin to use the timeline fact text (the text written in the Fact tab for a witnessed event) and to also do the same for family facts (the plugin as written only works for individual facts). It's still not quite what I want, but an improvement.

I've also been giving some thought to making the information clickable. Great minds think alike! It should be fairly straightforward as ID numbers are retained on import to TNG (may depend on the TNG import option you use) and any html in the text field is displayed as such on the TNG site. The new text in the field just has to include:

Code: Select all

<a href="getperson.php?personID=IDNUMBER&tree=TNGTREENAME">DISPLAYTEXT</a>

Where IDNUMBER is the person's ID number (including the letter I), TNGTREENAME is the name of the tree within TNG, not the site name, and display text is whatever you want to have show.

Would you like me to post up my variation on Mike's plugin? I haven't tested it properly yet so use at your own risk (and always on a copy of your file) and I'm not sure what the etiquette is about attribution... What's the best way to do so? I'd be very interested in any further developments!

[tatewise]

Shelley, could you also contact Darrin Lythgoe at darrin@lythgoes.net and if you both ask then maybe TNG will gain the Witnesses feature before too long and all this effort will be unnecessary.

I am fascinated in how you have incorporated Family Facts into the Plugin, because they cannot migrate to Individual Facts for the Witness Individuals i.e. there is no such thing as an Individual MARRiage or DIVorce event, and Family fact fields such as HUSB/WIFE AGE need to be excluded, to avoid illegal GEDCOM.

[jclifford]

I have followed up Mike's reference to ASSO tags and adapted my edit programme to use them. This gives me exactly what I want - a succint description of the witness role on the witness's page and a 1-click link to the Principal's page which shows the full details of the event. See attachment.

[tatewise]

Have you Emailed Darrin Lythgoe to request Witnesses in TNG as I suggested, because he is often very receptive of suggestions.

[jclifford]

I have now.

[tatewise]

I have also Emailed Darrin, and in his reply says TNG already supports the _SHAR tag used by FH Witnesses but he calls it Shared Events, which is a better description.

So if that is consistent with the way FH uses _SHAR then my Plugin can be adapted to keep Witnesses/Shared Events intact.

That can be tried as an experiment using the current Plugin.
Having selected (TNG) The Next Generation export mode, open its Extra Options tab and set Witness Role 2 _SHA%u: to Keep Custom Tags (LFT RMT FTA) to mimic Legacy, RootsMagic, & FamilyTree Analyzer.

Then export from FH and import into TNG as usual. How does that behave?
Do you get Witnessed/Shared Events presented to your liking?

[jclifford]

I have tried the settings you suggest Mike, and in some ways it gives a better result than using "Move to Fact Note" in that it no longer lists all the witnesses on the witness's page in TNG, so the page is shorter and easier to read, particularly if the text of the wills is in the source footnotes.

On the other hand:

- the Event for the witness is now called the same as the original event, e.g. "Will", which is a bit confusing for a viewer who is expecting or trying to find the actual will of the witness him/her self

- if the text of the wills is in the sources then it is even less clear which is the witness's own will ( = the one which doesn't have a role) and whom the other Will events belong to

- and there is still no hyperlink to view full details of the Principal behind the event, e.g. who the other witnesses are.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem is that when a user of FH selects/clicks on a witnessed event (i.e. with a blue arrow on the left) , FH must produce the data "on the fly", or when the project was opened, (date, sentence, note etc) but does not save this data in the gedcom record of the witness. So this process is very difficult to simulate in TNG or in the Export Gedcom plugin.

I have got a solution which satisfies me by using a 2-stage process - using the Export plugin with the original settings for TNG and then editing the gedcom produced by the plugin to replace, in the record for each witness, the full details of the event witnessed by a "backwards" ASSO/RELA pair of tags.

Example attached, where most of the wills have the text in a Note Field but the Will Text of the Principal is in the source text.

[tatewise]

I am relieved that TNG does offer some support for _SHAR Witnesses and maybe with a bit of tweaking will give you what you want. I am sorry that I did not discover the capability earlier, but I don't subscribe to TNG and rely on others to explore its features.

Yes, the Principal and Witnessed facts have the same name, but as you noticed, the Witnessed facts have a Role identified.

There is still the issue of hyperlinks between Principal and Witnesses. Perhaps the Export Gedcom File Plugin could create ASSOciation links automatically. Feedback an Email to Darrin with your observations, and see what he suggests.

There are many synthesised Facts shown in the Facts tab. Witnessed Facts with blue arrows are some, but others are all the grey bullet Events of Relatives you choose to include. Your use of Witnessed Facts is a non-standard GEDCOM feature, so other products will deal with it differently. That is why a 'better' option is to actually create separate custom Facts for each Witness all with a shared Source Citation, then via that Source it should be easy to find the Principal and every Witness, and it exports as standard GEDCOM. That is the recommended way of recording all the household members of a Census.

[tatewise]

I have continued the dialogue with Darrin Lythgoe by E-mail to discuss hyperlinks between Principal and Witnesses.

Thanks for the suggestion. I wouldn't be against having a link back to at least the principle individual. Any suggestions on how that might look? Just like a note line underneath the event? Maybe links to the other individuals could be there as well but start collapsed.

That sounds ideal to me, but I don't use TNG, so what do you guys think?
We would need to clarify that it would be a both-way link, such that from the Principal Event there were links to all the Shared Event Witnesses.

Maybe we could also discuss with Darrin some way of naming the cloned Shared Events differently from the Principal Event, perhaps by involving the Role name, or at least by adding (Role) or (Shared) as a suffix to the original Event name. That would make searching for the original Principal Event more practical.

[jclifford]

I have replied to Darrin as below:

I had 3 issues when trying to display in TNG the witness events in trees/gedcoms produced by Family Historian.
A. Bulk
Witness events were taking up too much space when displayed in TNG, but that was not because of TNG and has been partly solved by suggestions made by Mike Tate.
B. Event Names
I think we need to distinguish shared events with equal participants like Census or MI events from other events where there is one principal person and other witnesses or roles who are subsidiary like godparents at a baptism or beneficiaries in wills.
For the latter FH uses _SHAR/ROLE pairs of tags e.g.
1 WILL
2 _SHAR @I8028@
3 ROLE Beneficiary

TNG uses the _SHAR tag to display on the witness's details page:
Will {date) [4] (link to source)
o Role: Beneficiary

I think this is misleading because
1. it uses the same event type name (Will) for both witness events and the individual's own will event which can only be distinguished by the absence of a Role line.
2. To see who is the principal referred to in a witness event you need to click on the number against the date (the link to the source footnote)

It would be more useful if TNG named this as "Role" or "Witness" instead of "Will".

C. Links
One of the advantages of TNG is the hyperlinks to go from person to person. I think it would be very helpful if this could apply to Witness events to link back to the Principal.
I wrote a programme to edit the output from Mike's Export plugin using ASSO/RELA tags:
1 ASSO @I483@
2 RELA Executor and residual heir in Will 6 MAY 1546

which worked quite well when displayed in TNG.

[jclifford]

This is just a footnote to Mike.

I tried your suggestion of putting the text of a will in the Source Text field instead of the Note field but I am not happy with it:

1. It still leaves the list of Witnesses under Note when exported from FH

2. I can understand the benefit of using this technique for an equally shared event like a Census; but for a will the text is the main content and nothing to do with the provenance of the Fact (which I consider the reason for sources)

3. It is more difficult to access and read the source text than a Note, particularly in Legacy where it it is difficult to find the source text and in which most of my trees were built, but also in FH unless you are using a floating Property pane.

[tatewise]

1. I think we are all hopeful that Darrin will update Shared Events to have links to all associated Individuals that are initially 'collapsed' so they consume little vertical space until required. If that does not materialise, then I would consider adjusting my Plugin to optionally just include the Principal in the cloned copies, and perhaps even automatically create the ASSOciation links.
2. I don't quite follow your logic here.
   For a Census Event the main content is the Census Return, for a BMD Event it is the BMD Certificate or Parish Record, so I do not see what is different about a Will, nor why only the Principal should display it when it is just as important to say a Beneficiary or Executor.
   Anyway, how can the Plugin decide which parts of the Note text from the Principal Event each user of the Plugin would like, or not like, to be cloned into the Shared Events? There would have to be some way of 'labelling' those Note text parts.
   If we prefer to use the TNG Shared Events option then this problem transfers to TNG and Darrin.
3. In FH, with the Sources for pane displayed, the Will local Note and its Citation Text From Source and Note fields are all displayed together.
   The Source record Text From Source and Note fields are just one click away via the Go To Source Record button.
   Sorry, but I don't consider that difficult. Why does a Floating Property Box make any difference?

[jclifford]

Perhaps, as a TNG user, I was looking from a different perspective.

It seems to me preferable to have only one copy on a website of most of the content but a simple and quick route to see it. TNG performs this function very well. So if I am looking at a person's page and notice that he was a beneficiary of some other person's will, then I may want to know the details of the will but I may prefer to know about the other person's relationships or places. So I would like a link to the whole page of information about the Principal of that event. If this can be done (as it is by my edit programme) there is no need for expansion of witness events or links to a source record.

Hence, there is no need for the plugin to select or copy anything more than it already does when set to "Keep Custom Tag" provided that Darrin can arrange for TNG to convert the _SHAR tag into a link from the Principal to each witness (as it does now for ASSO tags) and also create a "Witness/Role" event in each witness's data consisting of a link back to the Principal.

[jclifford]

Mike, regarding your point 3:

On my computer when I can see the Sources For pane below the Fact tab, the Fact note is several lines of text deep but the Text From Source box will only show one line of text at a time and I find it difficult to read a long piece of text there.

In referring to the floating property pane, it has the source pane alongside giving much more room so I assumed that the Text From Source box would be deeper. But I see that it is still only one line deep so my comment was erroneous. Sorry.

[tatewise]

Obviously, if we leave the handling of _SHAR to TNG Shared Events then it is out my hands and that of FH.
You would have to discus the options with Darrin.

Regarding the FH Property Box let's clarify a few points.
You can have the Sources For pane positioned at the Bottom or to the Right of the Property Box whether it is Docked or Floating as per Tools > Preferences > Property Box settings.
Yes, the Citation Text From Source box is currently only one line (I'd forgotten that too), but just click on its [...] edit button and it opens in a larger edit window just like every long-text field.
Alternatively, use the Citation Note field that is about the same size as the Fact Note field.
Alternatively, use the cited Source record Text From Source field, which is even larger, and only one click away via the Go To Source Record button, from which it is easy to return via the Go Back button. This also where a Media image of the Will should be attached. i.e. just like any other Source citation.

[jclifford]

Thank you Mike, I hadn't noticed the expansion buttons.

[tatewise]

It would appear you have not studied the Book Getting the Most From Family Historian as advised in how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers.

In that Book in Chapter 2 Editing Records with the Property Box within the first 4 pages it introduces those [...] helper buttons, and describes two other ways of opening the edit window; one being to simply double-left-click within the text field to 'open' the edit window.

[jclifford]

Mea culpa. And I owe you another apology for inflicting my ideas on this forum before thinking them through properly.

It is true, as I said, that TNG handles _SHAR tags but, from an FH user's point of view, it does so in a perverse and unhelpful way which I will discuss with Darrin.

FH uses _SHAR as an attribute (level 2 in a Gedcom file) of an event, on a level with Date or Place but TNG currently reads it as though it was level 1 and creates a new event (in the Principal's data) with the same name so a person with seven witnesses mentioned in their will is diplayed as having 8 Will events.

[tatewise]

Yes, TNG effectively clones the Principal Event in much the same way as the Export Gedcom File Plugin does by default at present in the published version 3.0.

We are investigating the possibility of changing the Plugin to use the native TNG cloning feature by retaining the _SHAR tags, together with potential TNG enhancements added by Darrin that would not only benefit FH users, but also Legacy and RootsWeb users, because they support the same _SHAR feature.

1) Principal and Witness links:-
Darrin has proposed to implement dynamic links between Principal & Witnesses via a collapsible dialogue associated with each cloned Shared Event. (i.e. Similar to your ASSOciation strategy.) Is his proposal to your liking?
(To me, his proposal is preferable than adapting my Plugin to provide some form of links perhaps using ASSO tags.)

2) That leaves the problem of differentiating Principal Events from the cloned Shared Events.
In reply to my enquiry he confirms that "Right now, you would not be able to isolate the "principal" event with a search."
John, might it be possible to filter out the cloned Shared Events by using the Role: note that only appears in those copies and not the Principal Event?
If that is not feasible, we need to persuade Darrin to provide something else, such as a modified fact name for the cloned Shared Events perhaps by adding (Shared) or (Role) to the name, or some other distinguishing characteristic. Have you any ideas? Does TNG allow any sort of tags or flags to be attached to facts?