Marriage is not a shared fact. It is a couple fact, normally called a family fact in the RM user interface. It does not show up in the individual timelines for individuals in narrative reports. It can sound very strange to share a marriage fact with the principles to the marriage, but doing so is the only way to get the marriage to appear in the timeline for each individual who is a party to the marriage.
1 Like
Most of us donât use your point form however, but it may well be a moot point. @ popmorgangd was looking for a 1 generation ancestor report with with the spouse. So just for giggles, I tried one.
I have a couple, Joseph McCarty and Catherine Livingston that I experimented with. All I know of their marriage date is that it was prior to 1810. So I deleted the marriage that I had. I then entered it for Joseph. Ran the 1-gen report, it does not show up as expected. I then shared this marriage with Catherine and used the default Witness role. Report for Joseph shows nothing, and for Catherine I get âShe witnessed the marriage of Joseph McCarty and Catherine Livingston in 1810â. Awkward sentence!
Went to Joseph and shared the marriage fact with him, and again, got an awkward sentence. Joseph McCarty witnessed the marriage of Joseph McCarty and Catherine Livingston in 1810â.
So what it all boils down to is that the OP is going to have to share his marriage with himself and his spouse(s), he is going to have to assign them a role and create a sentence that reflects that he married the spouse on so and so date.
It is not a simple case of sharing the fact to get it to appear. It is going to require some hoop jumping and he would likely be better off with an individual summary or FGS than trying to use a 1-gen ancestor report, which wasnât really built for what he was trying to do.
I also did try sharing the marriage fact and came to the same conclusion 
Pop
The âShe witnessed the marriageâ is the default sentence for the fact when it is shared. Every RM built-in fact (or maybe nearly all) has Witness as the only built-in Role and they all have the really awkward âHe/she witnessed the eventâ sentence by default. This gave me heartburn in trying to understand shared facts when they were first introduced into RM. The whole notion of a âwitnessâ made no sense to me. A midwife didnât âwitnessâ a birth. A midwife delivered the baby, etc. But that wasnât immediately obvious to me, and I just couldnât figure it out. When I finally figured out that I just needed to delete or not use the Witness role and instead to define my own roles, it all started to make sense.
For users of more standard sentences than my point form sentences, an appropriate sentence for an Individual_Marriage role might be something like the following.
[ThisPerson] married <%[Wife:full]|[Husband:full]> [Place][Date].
Normally, the sentence for a role will use [ThisPerson] and [Person]. For midwife, it might be something like the following where [ThisPerson] is the midwife and [Person] is the baby.
[ThisPerson] delivered [Person][Place][Date].
But for a role sentence for a couple fact such as Marriage, the two keywords are [ThisPerson] and [Couple] instead of [ThisPerson] and [Person]. For example, a role sentence for FlowerGirl at a wedding might be something like the following.
[ThisPerson] served as flower girl at the wedding of [Couple][Place][Date].
For Individual_Marriage, the [ThisPerson] variable pulls this person and you only want to print the name of the this personâs spouse rather than the whole couple. So you the sentence uses <%[Wife:full]|[Husband:full]> rather than [Couple]. Itâs using a gender switch to pull the spouse out of [Couple]. It pulls the [Wife] out of [Couple] if the person is male and the [Husband] out of [Couple] if the person is female. Iâm sure there must be a better way to pull the spouse out of [Couple] and Iâm not sure how I would do it to pull the spouse when there is a same sex marriage.
1 Like
Good to know I am not the only person who wants to run a narrative report for an individual person with all the facts of that personâs life included. Just that individual with lifeâs facts.
I go to a great deal of trouble to edit and customize my sentences about the individual for a good narrative. I see the sentence for the marriage. It looks correct. But there is no individual report that lists it.
I am going to review the sentence recommendation from thejerrybryan and see if I can make a workaround. Just seems like an automated report for an individualâs full facts can be part of the standard reports.
Thanks for this discussion.
The individual summary is fine, but I sure wish there would be a narrative option.
I think it would be a really good idea for RM to include an import function to add custom reports that were produced by third parties. For security purposes there might have to be a common location online where those reports would be located and perhaps verified or rated for download.
1 Like
Interesting Idea. Still, RM8 is a powerful program. It would be good to have a standard report that lists an individualâs life fully in chronological order. For the purposes of this discussion, I have been focusing on marriage, but the same problem applies to appearances in family census.
Have you looked at the Timeline list? See wiki for description and selection of people to include.Timeline List
1 Like
What they should really do is let users create their own templates.
That is a step forward. Thanks very much. I had not explored that.
I had been enjoying customizing the sentence templates to create a readable narrative, and and would really love it if narrative formats were able to select and individual or group and include all life facts. Maybe some time in the future.
LATER EDIT: Well, shoot. This Timeline list shows marriage to spouse, but not an appearance in his fatherâs census. I will have to add a residence fact, but sheesh, more work than it needs to be.
Submit an enhancement request to support@rootsmagic.com Attn: Renee to include shared facts in the Timeline list.
How about Importing a life sketch is that a possibility to include inside the narrative report? Can you drag & drop it into the narrative?
You are jumping in on a thread that has been dead for 8 months. You would probably chance getting a better answer by starting a new topic. But the answer is no, you canât drag and drop onto a narrative report. Depending on what report you are using, you can either add the life sketch to a fact note or person note, or you can generate your report and open it in a word processor for manual editing.