* Using fh to list military?

[E Wilcock]

In the past I used MS Access to list and index names of people mentioned in letters from World War 1. I have 16 names already entered in Access.
It seems to me that I could now use fh instead. I have used fh to list civilians mentioned in dairies from WW2 and found it useful.

But the army presents some questions -

1. Military Rank appears to be a name suffix in fh and it doesnt show unless I go to the All tab and expand the name entry. I am tempted to use the Rank as an alternative forename, as people are often mentioned in the letters by Rank, e.g. Captain Daniels.

2. To enter the Regiment I need to use a Military service tag for each person (custom I think) which I already have.

3. I will need to use an Event tag for each mention in the letters - because the source and citations fields do not include a date field. fh requires one to enter data before one can add a citation.
My purpose is to list individuals who are mentioned in family documents which I can make available as images but which I do not have time to transcribe. I would welcome suggestions or guidance.

[Jane]

As you know you can change the Captions on the Property box using Tools>Preferences

If you change the Caption on the individual box you can use Adorned on the Name

eg Add a caption of

Individual: %INDI.NAME[1]:ADORNED_FULL% [=RecordId()] =lifedates()

Personally I record Military information in the Occupation field, but if you prefer there is a military fact set in the Knowledge base.

[E Wilcock]

Jane - This was new to me. Apologies, but it hasnt worked and I am not sure that it is worth pursuing as we needed to get on with listing surnames and it proved quicker to use Access, largely because one can use Ctrl " to repeat fields.

However, if I ever bring my First World war Project into fh, I will need to sort this out.

The reason your suggestion failed may be that I had not entered the military rank correctly on the additional names pane? I entered it in the additional names box as a title and that creates an event with a date field, which of course from the point of view of genealogy is correct.

I entered a second person in fh and entered his rank Captain as a name prefix instead. That does show on his property box.

I too started by using Occ for military - but switched to multiple Military Service Events when using TMG. On moving to fh I reduced the set to a single Military Service custom event. I like it because it makes it easier to separate military from civilians.

[RSellens]

Hi,
I am not sure what you are trying to record/document exactly on your military project, but I have used a number of different customer events/attributes to record different aspects of my relative service, as when I looked at there are a number of different 'events' that occur for the person. So I have an 'Enlistment' event, which lists when/where the person joined up. A military service attribute, where I can document rank/unit and the duration for that, with new attribute used whenever they got promoted of moved unit. I then have separate attributes to record items like when they embarked/sailed to/from a battle zone, conflict attributes to record individual battles that they took part in, medical/hospitalisation tasks for when they got wounded, etc Each of these 'events' can then be supported by sources/citations as needed as the whole picture builds up from lots of different sources. I find this works really well for giving the picture of the service for the individual, and then queries can be run to list people who served in various units/battles, etc


Richard

[E Wilcock]

Thank you Richard. That is useful.
Have a bit of a dilemma because I ditched most of my custom Events when leaving TMG. And that was partly because of the way fh was launched advocating a version of Gedcom.

But to go back to my technical failure.
I had not previously understood the term Caption on the property box?
The expression Adorned is also new to me.
But I pasted the Expression into the Options/Property Box/Name slot.
And for the soldier where I added Captain as alternative name or title, nothing changed.
For the soldier where I entered the rank Captain as name prefix it does. Tho I think it did before I made the alteration.

Into which field should the Rank go to show up.

[Jane]

If you add an Alternate name you would need to add a different data reference, including the second name. The adorned qualifier is a standard one. A good tip to see what they all do, is to open a custom query and click down through the qualifiers and it will explain at the bottom what they all mean.

Titles are stored in
%INDI.TITL[1]%

Alternate names are stored in
%INDI.NAME[2]% %INDI.NAME[3]% etc

So if you wanted you could have

Individual: %INDI.NAME[1]:ADORNED_FULL% (%INDI.TITL[1]%) [=RecordId()] =lifedates()
or even
Individual: %INDI.NAME[1]:ADORNED_FULL% %INDI.NAME[2]:ADORNED_FULL% (%INDI.TITL[1]%) [=RecordId()] =lifedates()

[E Wilcock]

Jane - You asked what I wanted to do. I wanted to index the Names mentioned in correspondence from an infantry Battalion in the Western front.
Having done that and in order to identify these people, I set about copying the names to fh - about 130 names and ran into considerable difficulty.

The majority of names consist of Surname only with no forenames or initials of forenames.

How does one enter these incomplete names in fh so they are recognised as surnames? I searched the KB and the book - could find nothing. In the end had to paste in a forename unknown for every man before fh accepted surnames. I suppose in genealogy most people with one name only are wives whose birth name is unknown, so single word names are saved as forenames?

But I also have - unsolved- people referred to in a letter as as William F. where William is the forename and the surname is shown only by an initial. There may even be John B. and his younger brother Alan B.

How do I get fh to recognise that initial as the start of the surname and not as the initial of a middle forename?

[LornaCraig]

FH recognises anything between two slashes as a surname. So /Smith/ or just /S/ will be treated as a surname. If you enter only one name FH will assume it is a forename unless you put slashes round it. If you enter more than one name or initial FH will assume the last name or initial is the surname. It is not normally necessary to enter the slashes manually because the default assumptions are usually correct (except in languages where the surname is put first), but you can tell FH which is the surname by entering the slashes. You can use Tools > Preferences > Property Box and set Show Surnames Between Slashes to Always, to help see what has been entered. (I think the default is Only When Necessary).

[E Wilcock]

Thanks Lorna - So the double slashes // one sees are two single slashes which as yet have no surname text entered between them?

[LornaCraig]

Yes, that's right.

[E Wilcock]

Thank you so much! I hadnt understood that. And was deleting them.