Q.1 Why would a fact type added to the People view using the customize option display no data even when the fact type is present and completed in an individual’s record?
Q.2 Can you only display individual facts on the person screen or should you be able to select family/couple facts too?
I recently wanted to locate a family I had been working on but couldn’t remember the couple’s names, but knew I had recently found and entered a divorce entry for them which is unusual.
On the person screen I couldn’t see the “divorce” field I expected but added the “divorced” one that appeared as an option. When that revealed no data I tried the “divorce date” still nothing. Intrigued now I went outside of RM and found the actual media by searching for “divorce” in the filename and found the couple. I went back to RM and looked at the record. Having seen various notes on “family” fact types recently I thought I had found the problem - my “divorce” fact type was a family type and I assumed that was why I couldn’t select it and why the divorced one had no data (I hadn’t used it).
I added a “divorced” fact to the wife of the couple and went back to the people view where the “divorced” fact was showing. There is no data in it for this lady even though the fact type is in her record.
People View does not support couple facts such a marriage and divorce.
I don’t know how you could have added Divorce fact because couple facts are not displayed in the list of eligible facts to add in the People View dialog. The only possibility is that you have some kind of individual divorce fact in your database. It’s not likely you would have added it yourself. If such a fact is in your database, more likely it would have come into your database via some kind of import rather than you entering it yourself.
I had concluded that the person view did not allow “family/couple” facts, but the divorce fact I selected is available and is listed as a “personal” fact type (I assume that is the same as individual). It is one of the facts available when you chose to customize the view, my problem is that it does not display any data even when there is data available.
UPDATE: I just downloaded the latest version of RM8 and played around with the personal fact type divorced - adding the date and place fields to the customized screen and I have data.
The default for the Divorce fact is: Date - yes, Place - yes, Description - no. So the Description field should be the only one you have to turn on. Most of RM’s built-in facts seem to have Description turned off by default.
In the context of RM’s fact list, individual facts and personal facts are synonymous. There are only two types. One type is individua/personal. The other type is family/couple.