How do I edit the immigration sentence template? Mine is [person] immigrated< [Date]>< to [Place:plain]> from <[PlaceDetails]>. but when reading the results the word ‘at’ is before <[PlaceDetails]>. i.e., John Doe immigrated in 1844 to United States from at North Ireland
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The “:Plain” option should remove the “at” .
[person] immigrated< [Date]>< to [Place:plain]> from <[PlaceDetails:plain]>.
It seems to me that the your sentence has a deeper problem than the “at”. Namely, genealogy software and genealogy data models only support one “place” item per event. This is true across genealogy software and genealogy data models writ large. It is not just the way RM does it. It’s the way all genealogy software does it.
RM’s [PlaceDetails} is itself non-standard, but its purpose is to provide a subordinate place to go with a main place, such as a cemetery name to go with a city, county, state, country. [PlaceDetails] can be used in a similar manner with other subordinate places such as church names for weddings or funerals, and hospital names for births or deaths.
The standard way to handle immigrations is with two facts. In your case, that would be an Emigration fact from North Ireland and an Immigration fact to United States.
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You are using the wrong tag. You immigrate to a country, you emmigrate from a country.
If you are intentionally wanting to use one fact to describe both the “to” and “from”, then you might want to consider editing the Fact Type to use the Description field. You could then add the “from” information in the description field and modify the sentence to use the description. This approach is a bit more standard; it would accomplish your goal without mangling your Places. You still might run into issues with exporting a gedcom to another site. I’ll defer to others on that point but I expect that the Description field is disabled by default on Immigration fact types in order to comply with gedcom standards.
I make extensive use of the Description field for all kinds of purposes, and I regularly turn on the Description field for fact types where it is turned off by default.
That being said, there is a bit of a weakness sometimes with this approach because the Description field is just text. What I mean by that is that names in the Description field do not become a part of the Name Index in RM’s reports and places in the Description field do not become a part of the Place Index in RM’s reports. The same thing is true of the Note field. Names and Places in RM’s Note field are not in the indexes in RM’s reports.
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@Cherwall and @kevinm --like Jerry I add description to a lot of facts-- there are some that are already checked such as DEATH etc but most are left unchecked-- as for a gedcom, a fact with the description used will export just fine BUT until you try, you will never know if it will or will NOT be okay in a different receiving software–for example Ancestry will show the description BUT keep in mind that your description and fact notes have to be less than 250 we think-- anything much larger than that will be cut off-- and keep in mind that Ancestry does NOT have place details…
As for RM, if you sent the gedcom to someone else using RM ( or imported back into your program) , it will NOT show in RM UNTIL you go in and check description and add <[desc]> to the fact then it will reappear..
Before on a gedcom import
After checking description and putting desc in the fact sentence
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hey Jerry, is there any help file, video or other documentation to teach someone these syntax tricks such as the :plain?
It is in Help under Sentence Template Language.
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This will give you ideas as to how to do thinks such as just have the person Given name etc
This one gives you ideas abt how you can add switches etc
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I’m not aware of any videos that get down to that level of detail. As others have already mentioned, your best resource is the Help file. Of course the Help file is not a true tutorial. You have to know what you are looking for. Just be aware that there are a lot of :option sorts of things in the Sentence Template language, things like :Plain and :At and :Full and :Short – and there are many more. You just have to look at the list to see what they each do.