Hi all,
I am creating a narrative report. Is it possible to have RM display the parents next to the child when child is married and listed separately?
For example; Mary Smith, daughter of Frank Smith & Sarah Jones, was born Jan 1, 1887…
Thank you
My more typical concern is the reverse. When a descendant narrative report goes to the next generation, it doesn’t list the parents of the child. In my case, that’s the behavior I desire. But at the same time, it does report the parents of the child’s spouse. In my case, that’s the not the behavior I desire. But in neither case is there an option to change the behavior. There is not an option to show the parents of the child or not to show the parents of the child’s spouse.
That being said, there are workarounds that are possible. But the workarounds require a bit of work on the user’s part and are not simply report options. I can think of a couple of ways to show the parents for the child.
- One of the ways is they way I do it. Namely, I have a Parents fact which I enter immediately after the Birth fact. This gives me what I want, but it produces two separate sentences - one for Birth and one for Parents - instead of a single sentence as you desire. Fortunately for me, I do want the two sentences. I suspect you do not.
- If you want the one sentence, you could add a Parents role to the Birth fact and share that role with the parents. You would change the sentence template for the Birth fact to include the Parents role and thereby you could produce the sentence you wish. The downside of this approach is that you would have to go to the effort to share the Birth fact for each person who has parents with those parents.
In my case, I also want to get rid of the listing of the parents for the spouse of the child because the spouse of the child already has my Parents fact. I know of no way to do this from within RM. That’s because the sentence that RM produces for the spouse of the child is not fully under control of RM’s sentence templates. What I do instead is to save my narrative reports before printing as *.docx files (Microsoft Word documents). Then I edit them with Microsoft Word and I’m able to delete all the parents from the spouse sentences with a single Microsoft Word command - a global replace. It uses Word’s equivalent to regular expressions. And really, I have to do two global replacements instead of one - one for “daughter of” and one for “son of”.
If you are interested in sharing your Birth facts with the parents as I have described above and if your database is too large for it to be practical to do the sharing for all the Birth facts manually, then it is possible using SQLite scripts to share all the Birth facts with all the parents. But use of SQLite in the manner is not supported or recommended by RM and it requires programming skills (or at least the ability to run an SQLite script that someone else has written).
Some one is likely to point out that RM’s descendant narrative reports do support the option to print uplines. It’s a nice feature, but it’s not the same thing as printing the parents.
If you did want to at least play with the sharing idea for the Birth fact, you would probably need to change the Birth sentence to be something like the following.
[person]<, daughter of [Parents],> was born< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>
Well, I’m being lazy. You would need a gender switch so that it would say daughter or son as appropriate. I have used gender switches but I can’t remember how to do it without looking it up in the Help file. But the concept is very clear. With the <angle brackets> in place, the parents part of the sentence will not expand for people who have no parents and the parents part of the sentence will expand for people who do have parents. There are a few additional nuances to consider if you really want to get into this but that’s the basic idea.
Thank you very much! I was reading through some other posts and thought this might be a workaround. I created a new fact Birth w Parents, with your sentence structure. Then, if I don’t like it or it doesn’t work, I can just use the original birth fact
I created the sentence, but it does not seem to be bringing in the Parent names? The word Parent appears in the report within the brackets
Did you create the Parents role for the Birth fact? And did you share the Birth fact with the parents.using the Parents role? You have to do both of these things for the [Parents] variable to work in the sentence.
The Birth fact comes built in with a Witness fact and with a Doctor fact. Unless you are going to be using these roles, I would recommend removing them. That’s because the sharing process will default to the Witness role because it’s first in the list. You can override the default to select the Parents role, but it’s easier to use the Parents role if it’s the first one in the list. Also, I refreshed my memory and you would replace “son” in my sample sentence with <% son | daughter | child > in order to get the proper gender for the child in the sentence.
Thank you, I haven’t done sentence format/structuring in many years, so am relearning this. And RM has it’s own ways of doing things.
I adjusted the birth role to this: [person]<, child of [parents],> was born< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>
I like using “child” instead of son/daughter, it is more general
I created the Parents role, deleted the other (2) roles
I did share the role with the first descendant in my tree, and his parents appear. But none of the other descendant parents appear.
Do I have to share/link each parent to the child for the parents to appear in the birth sentence?
I have about 6,000 descendants, linking each one to parents would be a very long task
Yes, you have to share each parent to the child. If you only share one parent, then only that one parent will appear. There is an additional problem. If you share both parents at the same time, it’s pretty random which parent will be printed first. I prefer to print father and then mother. So I always share the father as a first sharing operation and the mother as a second sharing operation.
Using “child” instead of “son” or “daughter” is fine. However, it’s extremely easy to use a gender switch so that it will say “son” for male children and “daughter” for female children.
Doing this manually for each of 6,000 descendants would be a very long task. I think it might be practical for something like 100 or so descendants, but probably not for 6000. That’s where SQLite might come into play. With the script already existing, then running it would only take a few seconds to do all 6,000 descendants.
I’m not sure I can link/share the infor for all of the parents, I had already shared the parent info for the first generation. I deleted the parent/witness fact and the shared parent info on the (8) descendants still appears in the narrative report. So, I guess I only had to share the parentage.