For Fact Sentences
Is there a way to show “Mother” “Father” (or Parents) – I could not find anything in the help file that allowed one to do that. (Example for Birth Record might want to show the bio parents etc)
You could share the Birth event for a child with their parents, either in separate roles or a common role with a gender switch.
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Yeah – I thought of that but not using that work around option right now.
Thanks for suggestion
Kevin
That’s the only way short of typing the parent’s names into the Desc field of each instance of a fact or into the custom sentence for each instance. There are no variables for Father, Mother and Parents in the RM sentence template language.
Another workaround is this one from @thejerrybryan 
Query to Add Parents Events to RM Database #facttypes #events #sharedevent – SQLite Tools for RootsMagic
Thanks Tom – I guess SQL will be my friend in this case (will add to note field)
I have a Parents fact where I list the parents for the person. My primary impetus for introducing the Parents fact was to provide a location within the RM data structure to attach a citation as evidence for the identity of a person’s parents. I have never been able to find an adequate attachment point for such evidence within the standard RM data structure. And in my view, the problem does not really lie with RM. Rather, the problem lies with the linked lineage data structure supported by GEDCOM.
My favorite example is that my grandfather had sisters Edna Bryan born in 1908 and Willie Bryan born in 1910. Both sisters had early and somewhat primitive Tennessee birth certificates, but they were official, government issued birth certificates. I first entered a citation for Edna’s birth certificate on the Parents line in Edna’s Edit Person screen. This was not my new Parents fact. Rather, it’s the Parents line that’s always there in every Edit Person screen in RM for anyone who has a parent. So far, so good. Then I went to Willie’s Edit Person screen, where I discovered that the citation for Edna’s birth certificate was already there, even though it didn’t have anything to do with Willie’s birth. And when I added a citation for Willie’s birth certificate to the Parents line on Willie’s Edit Person screen, then that citation showed up as a citation on the Parents line in Edna’s Edit Person screen.
That seems very illogical to me. It just doesn’t seem like a good data model. A further problem is that if I went to the Edit Person screen for either of the parents, then the citations for both birth certificates was present on the Spouse line for each parent.
Therefore, I created a Parents fact. I have frequently wondered if I might have been better off creating roles for the Birth fact to share with the parents rather than creating a whole new fact type. But ultimately it seemed to me that having evidence for a person’s parents was not quite the same issue as having evidence for a person’s birth date and birth place. So I went with the separate fact and created the Parents fact.
I am reluctant to use RM’s shared roles because they don’t play nice with Ancestry and FamilySearch and sometimes they don’t play nice with other genealogy software. So my first plan was to enter the names of the parents into the Description field for Parents fact and to include the [Desc] variable in the sentence for the Parents fact. But doing so does not create the data structure I wanted, so I finally decided to share the Parents fact with each parent.
This creates the desired structure, and it also means that the names of the parents are no longer just text. For example, the names of the parents show up on the Name Index for reports as being listed on the same page as the child who has the Parents fact. But because not all genealogy software supports RM’s shared roles, I still enter the names of the parents into the Description field for the Parents fact while omitting the [Desc] variable from the sentence for the Parents fact, This means that the Parents fact and its information is not lost completely if my data is transferred to software that does not support RM’s shared roles.
At this stage of developing the Parents fact, I was leaving the sentence for the shared role blank because I didn’t need it to be defined in order for the Parents fact itself to print correctly in reports. But then I realized that this was opportunity to make the birth of a child into an event in the parent’s own personal timeline. So I named the shared role for the Parents fact to be Birth_of_Child, and that’s where I am now.
Again, I considered whether I might have been better off simply having the shared role be for the Birth fact and not having a Parents fact at all. But I am happy with my results doing it the way I do it.
A little nuance is that I use the same shared role for both parents. To make this idea simpler, suppose I had done everything by sharing the Birth fact rather than by creating a Parents fact. I then would have a choice of having a single Parent role to use for both parents or of having a separate Father and Mother role. It’s a very personal choice, I suppose. But be aware that if you go this route and use a [Parent] role for each parent, a single instance of the [Parent] variable in the Parent sentence or in the Birth sentence will expand to list both parents. It’s like having a shared role of [Bridesmaid] for the Marriage fact. If you do that and then share the [Bridesmaid] role with all the bridesmaids, then a single instance of the [Bridesmaid] role in the Marriage fact will expand to list all the bridesmaids.
That leads us to a final nuance. When you are sharing a role in RM, you can share with multiple people all in one go or you can share it with one person at a time. If you share with multiple people all in one go, you have no control over the order in which they appear in reports. Just for the sake of consistency, I like to list parents in my Parents fact with the father always first and the mother always second. So I do the sharing one parent at a time, father first and then mother second. If there is only one parent, I only share with the one parent. Then the [Parent] role in the sentence expends either to both parents in the desired order or else just to the one parent. No complicated manipulation of the sentence is required to make this work. That’s just the way it works.
I give my Birth fact and Parents fact for a person the same date and same place. Then I set the respective sort dates to make sure the Birth fact is in front of the Parents fact.
Here is my template for the Parents fact.
principal:
(new line)
Parents:< [Birth_of_Child].>
Birth_of_Child role:
(new line)
Birth of Child: <[Date:plain]><, [Person:Full]><, [Place:Plain]><, age of <%ThisPerson%father|mother>: [ThisPerson:age:plain]>.
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Well as usual you have gone well and beyond on detailing and gave me many things to think about.
I still do not fully understand why shared facts can work so well with many other software but are not used with ancestry or family search.