Is there a way to assign a source (or a fact) to a group of people, quickly and easily?
Let’s say I have a source that deals with being a coal miner, is it possible to create a group that contains all the people whose occupation is “Coal Miner” and assign that source to them in one simple action?
If there is no way to do that I think this would be a pretty good feature to include in the next release and could be used for a variety of things. As an example there could be a source on a particular Location and it would be nice to quickly attach this source to all the people who lived at that location without going through all the individuals (in that group) and attaching it separately.
Shared facts might be the solution you need, depending on your use case.
If, for example, your grandfather was a coal miner, and you have added his co-workers into your tree as free-standing entities, a shared fact could be used as proof of their association.
First, you’d do as normal by creating an Occupation fact for your grandfather and attaching the source / citation as usual. Then, you’d edit that fact and use the shared fact capability to add that fact to all the other Person records. The source / citation gets attached to them as well.
Caveat: the default shared-fact role for everyone else is “Witness”. You’d want to create a new role called something like “Co-worker”.
I think that adding a source to a group of people and adding a fact to a group of people are very different issues.
In the case of adding a source, would you be adding the source to a person record for everyone in the group, or would you want to be able to drill down to specific fact types such as Birth or Burial? If it’s to the person record, the capability already exists. Namely, Sources > slide in a citation associated with that source > 3 dots > Add this citation to multiple people. There is not an option to select people by group. But there is an option to select people by a Saved Search. So I could make a Saved Search with the same criteria that I could use to make a group. And I have even made a Saved Search which works by choosing everybody in group. That gives me the flexibility to choose everybody in the group to receive a citation. Again, this would attach the same citation to multiple Person records. I don’t know of a way to accomplish the same thing for specific fact types.
In the case of adding facts, there are two tools of interest. The first one is Tools > Fact Tools > Add a fact to everyone in a group. The other one is within the Edit Person screen where you can right click a fact and choose the Copy selected fact option. There is not an option to choose a group of people. But as before, there is an option to choose a Saved Search which can accomplish the same thing without making a group. Or what I do is make my Saved Search select from a group.
So I think everything you need is already there. Make a group or a Saved Search of everyone whose occupation is Coal Miner and then add a fact to all of them or add a source to all of them.
The only glitch is that you might be wanting to add your source to all the Occupation facts for Coal Miner. That is definitely trickier. I’ll have to think about the easiest way to do it. It would be easy to add a second Occupation Coal Miner fact to all such people where the second fact would already have the source. But then you would have to go through the group and delete the Occupation Coal Miner fact that didn’t have the source.
There is a crude way to somewhat accomplish this. It would involve using the GEDCOM feature, which has a capability to add a Source to all People or all Events or all BOTH People and Events during the IMPORT phase.
So, the premise would be to use GEDCOM to export individuals that are members of a Group created with a particular criteria in mind (eg. Occupation Coal Miner) or Selected from a list explicitly for that (Occupation Coal Miner AND Residence in Coal County, WV). Then, upon re-Import of that GEDCOM, attach the Source and follow that with Merge to reconcile the added Source as incorporated back into those duplicates being merged. Fleshing out the Source info would follow.
I have used this before, and it can be very nice. As for adding citations to people, it’s exactly like Sources > slide in a citation associated with that source > 3 dots > Add this citation to multiple people. But there is no analog that I’m aware of in the RM user interface which adds citations to all people and all events. As far as I know, that can only be done on a GEDCOM import. However, even on GEDCOM import the problem is that it is for all events or no events. It can’t be targeted to specific events.
Excellent observation by @thejerrybryan regarding all events. I’d add that one could/should do all these operations upon a copy of your master database ( or better yet, a subset of just the affected individuals ) where one CAN go through the somewhat tedious process of changing all currently in-use facts for the targeted individuals to be excluded from the database copy’s Export, thus not affecting the subsequent re-Import.
So the replies look interesting, but I guess don’t really do what I would like. So let me try and explain better…
I have a number of people who were Coal Miners and within the mining industry there are a number of sub jobs, in particular “Hewer” or “screener”. I would like to add a description of that particular job eg “A coal hewer is a miner who cuts coal from the coal face. They use picks and shovels to loosen and dig the coal.” to all the people where they have an Occupation Fact of “Coal Hewer” in a quick and easy way. I only want one copy of the actual description in the database, but it could be attached to multiple people and to the same person multiple times. In other words I would like my description of what a Hewer is attached to every occupation fact that contains the word Hewer.
I can’t see a way of doing this as it stands other than creating a group of all people containing the word “Hewer” in the Occupation fact and then working through this group person by person and adding my description to each appropriate fact. That is a lot of time and effort.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood this but I believe that you have created a Fact for the occupation of “Coal Hewer”, If this is the case then couldn’t you just edit the Fact Sentence to include “A coal hewer is a miner who cuts coal from the coal face. They use picks and shovels to loosen and dig the coal.” Is it that this option won’t show up where you would like it in any report? Sorry if this suggestion isn’t a viable option.
If there were a fact called Occupation, then the text about what a Coal Hewer is couldn’t be added to the Occupation fact because there would be other people with other occupations such as Farmer. But if there were a fact called Call Hewer, then the text about what a coal hewer is certainly could be included in the sentence for the Coal Hewer fact.
Well, upon further reflection it might be possible to use a value switch in the sentence for the Occupation fact to include the description for occupation of a coal hewer only when the occupation actually was coal hewer. But it surely would be a tricky sentence to construct. I would need to think about how you really wanted to sentence to appear in reports to see how easy it would be to construct such a sentence. But constructing such a sentence would be trivial of Coal Hewer was a fact separate from the Occupation fact.
Upon still further reflection, I think any of the three following ideas would work to include the text about what a coal hewer is in the actual Occupation fact without adding a separate Coal Hewer fact. I haven’t tested any of them, but I do have a good deal of experience with RM’s sentence templates.
As an overarching concept, RM’s value switches do not allow you to test the value of a variable. Rather, RM’s value switches only allow you to test for the presence or absence of a variable. With that in mind, here are the three possibilities I can think of.
Add a role to the Occupation fact called CoalHewer. Leave the sentence for the CoalHewer role completely blank. For persons who whose occupation actually was a coal hewer, share a role of CoalHewer with a dummy person who is not in your database. This will serve to make the [CoalHewer] role not be null for the person whose occupation actually was a coal hewer. Change the sentence for the Occupation fact to the following. [date] [person] was [Desc:A]< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>. <?[CoalHewer]| A coal hewer was a a coal miner who hewered coal (except make the sentence more meaningful.>
Exactly the same as #1, except share the role of CoalHewer with the person himself instead of to a dummy person. The sentence for the [CoalHewer) role remains null and the additional text to define what a coal hewer is remains a part of the Occupation sentence.
Add a role to the Occupation fact called CoalHewer. Leave the sentence for the Occupation fact completely unchanged. Define a sentence for the CoalHewer role that looks something like the following. A coal hewer was a coal miner who hewered coal (except make the sentence more meaningful). Share the CoalHewer role with the person himself.
The text you get in a report should be the same in all three cases.
In case #1 and #2, all the text will be coming from the Occupation fact. The only purpose of the [CoalHewer] role is to trigger the value switch in the sentence for the Occupation fact.
In case #3, some of the text will be coming from the Occupation fact and some of the text will be coming from the CoalHewer role. There is no value switch needed in this case. The additional text in the report which defines what a coal hewer is comes from the CoalHewer role. Any Occupation facts for occupations other than coal hewer will simply not share the role.
I think I like option #3 the best. For one thing, it would allow you to define roles for other occupations and to provide text to define what those other occupations were. But I’m willing to bet that most of your readers will know what a farmer is without any further explanation.
@thejerrybryan This is why I initially suggested the shared fact option. But bravo for doing the detailed thought-work of implementation!
The innovation of sharing the CoalHewer role with the person themselves is brilliant.
And, of course, because the Shared Fact interface allows you to simultaneously share that same role with multiple individuals, @Dark-Moon could apply it “… to a group of people, quickly and easily…”
I do see an overall flaw in what you’re trying to do @Dark-Moon , outside of the mechanism for doing it.
People rarely hold the same occupational role their entire lives, even if they’re in the same general domain. For example, I’ve been an I.T. professional for ~30 years. But in that time I’ve been many things, including system admin, system engineer, project manager and Agile coach. Similarly, you may have someone who’s general occupation is coal miner but coal hewer for only part of that.
If you create an Occupation (coal miner) and assign it some date timeframe for the first person, then share it, it’s going to associate that same timeframe with everyone else you share that fact with. That might not be accurate.
It’s a lot of leg work to be sure, but if you want the most accurate life history for someone in your tree, you kinda need to address them on a case-by-case basis rather than sharing something as variable as occupation between a group of people.
@Dark-Moon If I am understanding what you are saying, you want to add a fact such as Coal Miner Hewer with description of the job with a source/citation to a group of people.
So basically is this what you are looking for except a different occupation Thomas M Moore was an Apprentice Waterman from 5 Jan 1790 to 5 Jan 1797 at Port of London in London England. A Waterman transports people across the rivers where as a Lighterman transports goods across the rivers --guess you could say the medieval equivalent of taxi drivers and truckers.1 1. British Royal Navy, Dept of Waterways (1750–1865). Occupations and dates of all Non Military Personnel. London, England. British National Archives (wwwfindmy past: accessed 4 January 2024).
If so what I did was create a new Fact called Occupation: Waterman and Lighterman-- make sure to put a checkmark in description and use the following sentence except change what is in BOLD to your description for Hewer…
[date] [person] was [Desc:A]< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>. A Waterman transports people across the rivers where as a Lighterman transports goods across the rivers --guess you could say the medieval equivalent of taxi drivers and truckers.
note everything in Bold was just added to the end after place-- not sure how much you could write BUT this works for me BUT it will not show up on Ancestry (think you would have to do that in the description line and think there is abt 100 word? limit).
Anyway add the fact to the 1st person and create your source/ citation-- after that use the new COPY FACT ( RM 10) by highlighting the fact then clicking on the 3 dots-- you can either just mark the individuals you want or I would use a saved search…
You will then probably have to make minor changes such as dates or place-- the only problem I see is that you have to be very general on your source/ citation-- no names of an individual etc
Lots of great suggestions here and I am very thankful for all the advice, however, I’m still not sure I’ve explained myself sufficiently as yet.
What I want to eventually do is have something, be it a fact, source or note that I can set up with a description of a given occupation, it the case I initially described that of a Coal Hewer, but it could just as easily be (and would also need to be eventually) and Ag Lab.
When i add a Census fact to a person, most of the time I also add an occupation fact indicating what job they did at the time of the census, now I have a lot of people with these occupation facts and in the Description field of that fact I put the type of occupation eg “Coal Hewer”. So far so good, but what I want is to somehow either attach to that fact or source something that describes the actual occuaption.
Once again I could create a custom fact called “Coal Hewer” and add it to that person on the same date as the census fact. Not a problem, But with hundreds of people in the database with scores of them ahving worked as a Coal Hewer at various times I don’t want to have to work through the entire database adding this “custom source” or whatever everytime I see that that personwas a Coal Hewer. I want I way to do this operation in bulk so to speak. But I can’t see a way to do this and I suspect there is no way to attach the new custom to all the occupation facts that contain the description “Coal Hewer”.
For a batch operation such as this, I think your only option is to do it outside of RM using SQLite directly on your database. The easiest solution is to append or prepend the definition sentence or paragraph for the Occupation value found in the Event Description field to the Event Note field. Both fields are in the same table which keeps it simple. The Description field may get truncated at 100 characters in data transfer to other systems so the Note field is preferable.
However, there is no primary ‘definition’ whose changes would ripple through to all instances of that Occupation. It might be preferable to use a Citation instead, one for each different occupation reused for every instance of a given occupation. That’s a bit more complicated as it involves more tables and steps but is do-able and the result might be cleaner with the definition appearing only once in the Endnotes of a report.
