I am fairly new to RootsMagic. I have the latest version 11.1.2.0 on a windows 11 pc. I was experimenting with marriage facts, trying to customize so it would be more point form than sentence format. I ended up deleting all the marriage facts that I had added and reentering them with the RM template. Now when I run the narrative report, in the marriage section after the individual data, it has the couple as “wife and husband”, as opposed to “husband and wife”. Does anyone have any idea why this would happen? The sentence on the Edit Person screen shows “husband and wife”.
It should not have been necessary to delete your Marriage facts and re-enter them. It should have been sufficient just to change the sentence template in your Marriage fact.
Could you show us your sentence template. Assuming you use the [Couple] keyword, it will show whichever spouse you start with. For example, if I’m making a report of my great grandparents, if I start with my great grandfather it will put him first, and if I start with my great grandmother, it will put her first. The descendants are the same either way because neither one of them was married a second time. Then in the second generation, it shows the direct line person first. For example, for the sons, it will their son first followed by the son’s wife. And for the daughters, it will show their daughter first followed by the daughter’s husband. The exact same thing would happen if you used a combination of [Person] and [Spouse] instead of listing simply [Couple]. I haven’t played with it, but I suspect you could get the husband always to be first by using the [Husband] and [Wife] variables instead of [Couple] and instead of [Person] and [Spouse].
1. I realize that I didn’t have to delete them all. However, in my playing around, I managed to create a number of marriage fact types and then was stupid enough to add more than one to more than one person. Basically, I’m lazy and thus, I deemed it simpler just to start again. It’s been a while since I retired but in my working life, I had to learn a number of software programs which I generally did by doing. I forgot the cardinal rule - don’t play around with live data. Lesson learned or rather remembered!
2. The sentence template is from the standard RM Marriage fact:
One other thing, the Narrative Report starts with my father with the “Ancestors only” report option, if that has anything to do with it.
I also have a test database where I have not played with the marriage fact and the report still comes out Wife and Husband. So I don’t think it’s something I did, unless it has nothing at all to do with the marriage fact. I certainly can change the fact to use Husband and Wife fields instead of Couple.
The way I described it seems correct for descendant narrative reports, and I expected “Ancestors only” to work the same way. It doesn’t. You are very much correct. It always seems to put the wife first on such reports, and that does not seem correct to me. You might try reporting it as a bug. Or you might try creating a sentence with [Person] and [Spouse] instead of [Couple] to see if that gets you the results you are looking for.
Thank you. I was beginning to think I had messed up the couple somehow. Although it’s not a big deal, I will report the bug. I will also try creating a sentence using your suggestions.
UPDATE: [Person] and [Spouse] did not solve the issue. Work around is to use [Husband] and [Wife]
@tclark562 I maybe wrong BUT I don’t think that the wife being shown first in a marriage on an ancestor report is a bug-- I went back to RM 10 and ran an ancestor report in my test database and got the same results as RM 11
I also ran a descendant report in RM 11 and RM 10 --in that case it will swap back and forth between husband/ wife and wife/ husband depending on who the direct descendant of the ancestor is–in the screenshow below all the direct descendants are female ( so they are shown 1st) until you get to Dock Quack ( then he is shown 1st)-- if you were doing a descendant report on your paternal line–all the hubbies would be shown 1st…
You are correct @nkess. I did report the bug and got a reply. It seems that it is intentional in order to create the link between the husband narrative to the wife narrative. It definitely made more sense when I looked at someone with multiple spouses. Either way it’s not a big deal. I just thought I had messed something up. Here is the answer from support
"Thank you for contacting support.
The ancestor only narrative report using the wife sentece on the report.
The descendant narrative the marriage starts with the name of the descendant (male or female). In the ancestor narrative the father and mother are equal. It starts with the father (partner1) narrative and then introduces the mother (partner2) by starting with her name in the sentence. Then it moves to the mother narrative."
