When using Share there are 3 fields available - Name, Roll and Note. Is there a code name or way to be able to include the Note field into the sentence?
I would also like to be able to include the Note in other areas as well.
No, not at this time. I believe that it has been requested in the past, just not implemented.
There is no [Note] variable in the sentence template language. Instead, you can include all notes or exclude all notes as a report option for many reports. I think a [Note] variable would have been a better way to go. RM8 would have been the perfect opportunity to add this feature, but that ship has sailed.
I do understand that you are talking about the note associated with the role instead of the note associated with the fact. But it’s the same principle: the note for the role will be included in reports if all notes are included in reports, and vice versa.
The note in the role will be printed in the narrative for the person with whom the role has been shared. For example, if your role for the Birth fact is Midwife and if you include a note with the Midwife role, then that note will print in the narrative for the midwife who attended the birth, not with narrative for the person with the Birth fact.
Yes, it’s another of the famously old requests. Migrants from The Master Genealogist were particularly distressed because it had rich sentence template support of notes. I think a Note could be segmented with “||” and TMG had a sentence template variable that could pick out any number of the first 10 segments.
Thank you everyone for your replies. Shame it has not been incorporated as a feature in the program as I can think of many instances where I would like the information incorporated in the sentence rather than separated from the item at the end of a report.
At the moment I have a fact called DNA where I then use the Share function to record my DNA matches and in notes the cM amount, etc. for each shared match. The advantage for me is that I don’t have 50 separate entries under my name, but an easy to find list of my matches and the match has an entry under their name, but unfortunately, little information without being able to include the notes.
Please RootsMagic add this simple item.
Are we talking about the same thing? You can have witness notes (I call them role notes) and they are printed in reports without needing a [Note] variable. I may not be understanding the request.
Hello jerry,
I am talking about you have a fact and then under that fact their is the Share option under which you have a choice of Name (Person), Role (I think it is also called Witness Roll) and Notes.
When I find a DNA Match I use the Label DNA Match for them and then record details of the match in Notes. So, under my name I can see list of all the matches and click on any one of them and get the details, however, when you go to the DNA Match that information is not transferred to the fact under the match’s name. This is just one instance where I would like to be able to incorporate short notes into the sentence. Hope that makes it clearer for you, if not I’ll send you an actual example.
Apart from that I usually prefer to have the notes kept with the fact, rather than at the end of a report, especially a longer report. It would be great to actually have the choice of notes kept with the fact or together at the end of Reports.
I’m not following you and it seems to me that everything you are asking for already exists. So I need screen shots.
Tabular reports such as Individual Summary and Family Group Sheet simply have inadequate cell space for Notes and therefore are necessarily after the table. Narrative reports have the space and fact/event notes, if included at all, are always immediately following the fact sentence, never as a footnote or endnote.
I think you are wishing for the fact sentence preview area in the Edit Person screen to incorporate the fact Note.
A workaround for you would be to copy the required info from the fact note into the the customised fact sentence for each instance of that type of act. It won’t come out in tabular reports but will in narratives, independently of the option to include notes. You could frame that extra content in privacy braces so you have the option to suppress it in the narrative.
I asked exactly the same question to RM’s technical support. After two days they asked me to send a backup file of my file to see "how I have entered shared fact and role ".
Which, of course, I did not do: I simply asked a code name.
Happy to discover the right answer here.
I’m still puzzled by this thread. So I made a test database with three people - a father named John Doe, a mother named Jame Smith, and a child named Elizabeth Doe. I made a descendant narrative report with census notes. The notes all appear to be fine. As Tom mentioned, notes appear a little differently in reports such as a Family Group Sheet where the report format is a table. Here is the descendant narrative report.
I achieved the effect of the notes by sharing the Census fact. Here is the Census fact in John Doe’s Edit Person Screen.
Here is the Share screen for the Census fact in John Doe’s Edit Person screen with the Witness role for the wife highlighted.
If you slide down one more level in the right hand pane, this is what you see.
If you then slide back up and highlight the child on the Share screen, her is what you see.
So to me, it’s all working correctly. Each of the three people have their own distinct note for the Census fact, and each distinct note shows up fine in the descendant narrative report. That’s why I’m puzzled and why I don’t understand this thread.
Hello Jerry, and thank you for your reply.
I will try to clarify my question:
For each person that shares a fact/event you can add a role and a note. E.g:
| person | role | note |
|---|---|---|
| Joannes SUNNEN | witness | farmer in Feltz, aged 32 y |
| Nicolas KIRSCH | witness | farmer in Mersch, aged 52 y |
| Andrea KNEIP | priest |
For marriage witnesses I add age and occupation, as per marriage license
My question is:
How can I include these “notes” in the principal sentence and in the witness sentence?
Now the principal sentence structure looks as follows:
[Couple] <#Couple#was|were> married< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.<{ Witness<#Witnesses# was|es were> [Witness].} ><The ceremony was conducted by [Priest]>
which gives:
Jean REDING and Marie-Catherine WAGENER (KOHNEN) were married on 5 Mar 1770 in Betzdorf. The marriage was witnessed by Nicolas KIRSCH and Joannes SUNNEN. The ceremony was conducted by Andrea KNEIP
But what field/variable should I add in the sentence structure in order to get::
Jean REDING and Marie-Catherine WAGENER (KOHNEN) were married on 5 Mar 1770 in Betzdorf. The marriage was witnessed by Nicolas KIRSCH, farmer in Mersch, aged 52 y and Joannes SUNNEN, farmer in Feltz, aged 32 y. The ceremony was conducted by Andrea KNEIP
For the person who shares the fact, the sentence looks as follows:
[ThisPerson] witnessed the marriage of [couple]< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.
which gives:
Joannes SUNNEN, , aged 32 y, witnessed the marriage of Johan REDING and Marie-Catherine WAGENER (KOHNEN) on 5 Mar 1770 in Betzdorf
[ThisPerson] [?Note?] witnessed the marriage of [couple]< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.
Joannes SUNNEN, farmer in Feltz, aged 32 y, witnessed the marriage of Johan REDING and Marie-Catherine WAGENER (KOHNEN) on 5 Mar 1770 in Betzdorf
In Family Historian this is solved with the variable {%CUR~WITN.NOTE2%}.
My question is: What note/variable should I use to make these notes visible in the sentence structures above.
Thanks to you I discovered that the specific notes show up automatically for each witness in the narrative report. However you cannot define where the note should appear in the sentence: it will always appear after the sentence.
I guess there is no way to change that, because the variable is not available to build the sentence, and I understand that the witness note cannot be used in the principal sentence for the same reason.
So this thread can be closed.
Thank you for your clarification and my apologies for not understanding the issue more quickly.
It is correct that you cannot define where the note should appear in the sentence. The root of the problem is that RM does not support a [Note] variable. And even if it did, RM still does not support the concept from TMG where a sentence template could reference pieces of a note. This typically causes heartburn for TMG users converting to RM. Tom mentioned this issue in one of his messages in this thread.
I was never a TMG user, but I still wish RM handled notes in reports better than it does. One of my big concerns is that citation superscripts in RM’s narrative reports appear between the main sentence and the following note. I have several fact types for which the only data is the note. That means that the citation superscripts for such facts appear at the beginning of the entire fact. That looks terrible in printed reports. I work around the problem to a certain extent by placing a short introductory portion of my note into the Description field and I use the [Desc] variable. That way, the citation superscripts at least appear after the Description field and before the rest of the note. And in case you are wondering, I use the non-printing sort date field to get such “note only” facts to appear in the proper place in reports.
Correct. The only part of the witness information that can be used in the principal sentence is the name of the witness role. For example, you can add a role to the Marriage fact called [Bridesmaid] and then you can add this role to the sentence for the Marriage fact thusly.
[couple] <#Couple#was|were> married< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.< The bridesmaids at the wedding were [Bridesmaid].>
The single variable [Bridesmaid] then expands into a list of all the individuals who have the shared role of Bridesmaid. But that’s all you can do. As you have discovered, you can’t use a variable such as [Bridesmaid:Note], which is the sort of thing you need to be able to do for your use case.
There is a bit more nuance than that which I described. In particular, there are several kinds of switches. For example, there is a plural switch such that you can choose was vs. were for one bridesmaid or more than one bridesmaid. But that’s the basic concept of what RM does and doesn’t support in the principal sentence with respect to the witnesses.
Family Historian does, but only for the witness related sentence. But the descendant reports of FH are overall worse than the ones of RM.
I recently tried Patronomia, that creates descendancy and ascendancy books (pdf) based on your gedcom and yields interesting results, especially for descendancy narratives. But no RTF or Word output, so the output cannot be modified.
I have looked at the descendant reports from FH, and they are totally inadequate for producing the printed reports I take to family reunions. By contrast, with a little tweaking, RM does an excellent job of producing the printed reports I take to family reunions.
Messages in forums such as this one tend to focus on problems or limitations of whatever product is being discussed rather than on pointing out the good points of the product. So let me take this opportunity to point out that I have looked at many, many alternatives to RM for narrative reports to take to family reunions. So far, the narrative reports from RM are the only ones that I have found that are good enough. So kudos to RM on this one!
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Probably because you have to tweak them, pretty much the same as RM reports, but from what I have seen, something similar to you point reports can be produced.
For my purposes, there are two major problems with the FH reports. One FH report problem is that all individuals are carried forward to the next generation, even children that have no facts other than their names and their births. For printed reports for a family reunions, this is a bunch of extra paper. And beyond the extra paper, it just seems unprofessional. In RM terms, that means that FH does not support the Register and Modified Register formats (NEHGS and NGSQ).
The other FH report problem is that there is not a people index and a place index. These are great features in RM’s reports. What FH has instead is a single index that looks more like a keyword index.
I acknowledge that by default RM’s reports never carry an individual who has no spouse and no children to the next generation. I have very unusual situations where there is a lot of data for an individual, and that data looks very unprofessional when the only place it appears is when the individual is in a list of children. I have a workaround to force RM’s reports to carry such individuals to the next generation. But those individuals are not the norm, and I really don’t want all the last generation children carried to the next generation when the only data I have for them is name and birth. And remember that this is printed reports for a family reunion.
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