I’m wondering why there isn’t a predefined fact sentence field for “Mother” and “Father”; similar to husband & wife. This would be a nice feature enhancement.
From what I understand, one must create a Role in the Birth Fact for Mother and Father and share them for each child if you want to add their names to a fact sentence. The sentence language becomes complicated when only a single parent’s name is known.
Maybe someone already knows and easy way to do it. I would like to make a sentence that reads: “Child’s Name”, born 13APR2024 in Somewhere, to “Mother’s Name” and “Father’s Name”. If only a single parent is known, it would just read the mother or father’s name.
I have a custom Parent fact where I add the name of the parents if I don’t want them in the database. You could also enable the description field on the birth fact and add them there.
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There is a trick that makes the sentence template language easy when only a single parent’s name is known. Rather creating a Mother role and a Father role, create a Parent role. Then share the Parent role with each parent and change the sentence for the Birth sentence as follows.
[person] was born< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]><, the <%son|daughter> of [Parent]>.
The <%son|daughter> part is a gender switch, testing the gender if the principal rather than the gender of a parent, The [Parent] variable is a smart variable which expands to both parents if there are two parents and which expands to just one parent if there is only one parent. When the [Parent] variable expands to two parents, the conjunction and is added automatically. The expansion of the [Parent] variable to either one or two parents and there isn’t anything you have to do to make it happen.
There are some gotchas. One gotcha is that the Birth fact already has some roles defined. When you are sharing the roles, it is ridiculously easy to pick the first role in the list until you get used the user interface. You don’t see the list of roles. You only see the first role and you have to click the first role to get a list of all the roles. For that reason, I usually try to have only one role for a particular fact type when possible. Of course, it sometimes isn’t possible. But I would delete the pre-existing Witness and Doctor role for the Birth fact unless I had need of them. And even if I had need of them, I would delete them and put them back so that the Parent role would be first in the list.
Another gotcha is when the role variable expands to multiple people with the role, it lists the people in the order in which you share them. I usually want to list parents in order father followed by mother. So I always have to pick the roles one at a time and father before mother. I can choose multiple people in the same trip through the sharing dialog, but if I do it that way then I have no control over which Parent is listed first.
Another gotcha is that RM’s narrative reports list two kinds of people. A person is either a descendant (or ancestor for an ancestor report) or is a spouse. A narrative report does not already list the parents of the descendant (or ancestor for an ancestor report). So having a [Parent] role for these people is a very good thing. But a narrative report does already list the parents of all the spouses. So having a [Parent] role for these people is not a good thing because their parents are listed twice. And depending on the family for which I’m running a narrative report, the same person could be a descendant in a report for one family and and a spouse in a report for a different family. So I have to do the [Parent] role for everybody.
I save narrative reports as a DOCX file and do some additional processing on them with Microsoft Word before printing anyway. I have figured out a tricky way to use Microsoft Word to remove the double listing of the parents for the spouses. But even with all the power of RM’s sentence templates, RM’s narrative reports still include too much information that is not under control of the sentence templates and which is not under control of any report options. The listing of the parents of the spouses is one such piece of information that really needs to be under user control and is not.
As I have described it thus far, you could leave the sentence for the Parent role itself completely blank and you could be completely happy. Or maybe you could actually create some sort of sentence for the Parent role. For example, you could have a sentence for the Parent role something like the following.
<[ThisPerson:Poss] <%son|daughter> <[Person:Full]> was born> <[Date]><, [Place]><, age of <%ThisPerson%father|mother>: [ThisPerson:age:plain]>.
This can have a very pleasing effect in narrative reports, effectively turning the birth of a child into an event in the life of the parent - which indeed it is. In this case, the Role sentence might manifest itself as something like the following.
His son Willie Doe was born in 1870, age of father; 20.
I actually do mine a little differently because I have an actual Parents fact which I enter just after the Birth fact. I wanted the Parents fact as a place to attach sources for a person’s parents, which I don’t believe is otherwise available in RM nor in most any other genealogy software. I suppose I could have used the BIrth fact for that purpose, but to me the BIrth fact is about the date and place of birth for the infant and it isn’t the parents who are being born. But that’s just me. But because I already had a Parents fact, I shared it in precisely the manner I have described here for the Parent role for the Birth fact.
Aha, I just saw Renee’s answer that said more or less the same thing in two sentences as did my answer that was a whole book long.
I might add that I do put the name of both Parents in the Description field of my Parents fact as well as sharing it with each parent. Why do I do that? Well, I started out just with the Description field and without the sharing. I then realized that the names of the parents from the Description field did not appear in the Name index that always include at the end of my narrative reports.
I don’t in general like to use RM’s shared roles because often they do not transfer well to genealogy software other than RM. But in this case, I removed the [Desc] variable from the sentence template for my Parents fact, I continued filling in the parents name in the Description field of my Parents fact, and I shared my Parents fact with each parent. That way I get the names of the parents listed properly in the Name Index at the end of my narrative reports and I get the birth of a child added as an event in the timeline of the parents in my narrative reports. And if I transfer my data to genealogy software other than RM, my Parents fact and its sources are still there. So I get the best of both worlds.
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Just a thought here @thejerrybryan --since we can now copy facts , could we make a sentence to copy between the parents rather than sharing–of course that MIGHT be a lot more work as I can’t see anyway to copy it to the child unless you then customize the sentence
This is actually a case where copying the fact would not place the parents into the Name Index on the page for the child, whereas sharing the fact with a role does achieve that goal. RM’s shared facts were (and still are) a very good idea. It’s just that their implementation doesn’t seem as if it’s really completed.
Another way where the role is actually better for the Parents fact than a copied fact would be is that if the name of a Parent is changed for any reason, the role automatically picks up the change and a copied fact would not. And neither does having the name of the parents in the Description field for the Parents fact pick up the change in the parents’ names.
I think there are three features that need to be added to RM’s shared roles to make them into a great feature.
- They need to be able to be searched and otherwise managed just as if they were actual facts. For example, they need to be able to appear as columns in People List View and as columns in Custom Reports. They need to be fully supported by Advanced Search and Groups and Color Coding.
- As an OPTION, they need to be able to be exported as if they were actual facts. This would include export via GEDCOM, export to FamilySearch, and export to Ancestry. There may be other exports that I’m not thinking of right now, but those are the three I can think of.
- It needs to be much easier to specify the close family members with whom to share. The ability to using the marking dialog for to mark a whole family is too broad. This problem is not specific to shared facts. It has also come up in the context of copying facts. The weakness is actually in RM Explorer, and RootsMagic Explorer needs to be strengthened in this area for all uses of RM Explorer. Here I’m talking about being able to mark only the first three of six children for a census because the other three children have not yet been born. You can do it right now, but it’s very, very clunky - not easy at all.
- There are some loose ends in the sentence template language and in the printing of roles in sentences that need to be strengthened. For example, there are some qualifiers such as :Age that sometimes don’t work for roles. It’s sometimes hard to get multiple people with the same role to print in the desired order. It’s sometimes hard to get multiple people with similar roles such as Son and Daughter in the census to have the correct roles when they are given roles at the same time.
I know that’s four items in my list instead of three. But all I’m saying is that Roles are a good feature, but they are a feature that needs to become a great feature.
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@thejerrybryan Thank you so much for the detailed reply. Knowing the gotchyas are very helpful when planning how to execute this. I will have to do something thinking about your method of adding a parent fact. It seems so silly to me that they don’t have mother and father already predefined for fact fields; but I’m not a software engineer. It would be nice to have a child’s birth show up as an event in a parents narrative. Are there other report/chart programs that are more customizable, that you could import a GEDCOM into?
Two that I’m familiar with and that I use are Charting Companion and GedSite.
There was a time when you could purchase Charting Companion from the RM Web site. I don’t know what if anything that means about any business relationship between RM and Charting Companion. Charting Companion works with GEDCOM from any genealogy software, not just from RM. In the case of RM7, Charting Companion even had a direct import feature. I don’t know if the direct import feature still works with RM10.
Charting Companion has some nice charts that are fairly customizable, but Charting Companion does not support RM’s sentence templates nor RM’s roles. Charting Companion also doesn’t have its own sentence templates. In other words, sentences appear in Charting Companion’s narrative reports the they appears and you have no control over the sentences. Because it doesn’t support sentence templates, I can’t use it for narrative reports. I can use Charting Companion for some of its other charts that don’t depend on sentence templates. The main thing I have used it for is fan charts. I have taken a Descendant fan chart to family reunions, starting the fan with the family patriarch. RM only supports an Ancestor fan chart, which is of no value to me for family reunions.
GedSite only works with GEDCOM and there is no direct import. Well, I think it has a direct import from TMG. It supports GEDCOM from any genealogy software, not just from RM. But for several of the major pieces of genealogy software including RM, GedSIte suppports their special features such as sentence templates and shared roles. GedSite only produces Web sites and does not produce printed reports or charts. It works really well for me. And unlike Charting Companion, it supports its own sentence templates in addition to supporting RM’s sentence templates. I was surprised to discover that I didn’t much like the way my RM sentences looked on a Web site created by GedSite, so I use GedSite’s sentence templates to make sentences that look better for GedSite pages than do my RM sentences.
GedSite has a companion product for making e-books. But it doesn’t have a companion product for making printed books. Making e-books and making printed books would seem to be similar processes. But making e-books is more like making Web pages where you have hyperlinks to sources and to images and that kind of thing, Hyperlinks don’t really work on paper. I really want to take printed books to family reunions, not a bunch of thumb drives each containing an e-book.
I’m sure there must be other report/chart programs that import GEDCOM and that I’m not familiar with.