I have been using the military event type to enter Military Draft Registrations. It sort of works but recently created a narrative report for a family member and they complained that the wording of the event in the narrative report sounds like they served in the military. Since I am always adding, changing, and editing event information I don’t use reports for anything other than reviewing to look for errors or missing information. But when I send it to someone else they may want to keep it long term and would like it to read better. Does anyone know any tricks for recording Military Draft Registrations that may work better? I know I can edit the sentence building commands but am too lazy to do that.
If you don’t have anyone who actually served you could just change the sentence template. Or you could create a new fact just for the draft registration and create a good sentene template for it.
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I would just create a custom fact–not hard to do and use the following sentence
[person] was listed in the Military Draft Registration for< [Desc]>< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.
and your notes will now read the same as in the below example…
or use the following sentence
[person] was registered for the Military Draft for < [Desc]>< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.
and you sentence in reports now reads
Van Winkle Acorn was registered for the Military Draft for 1917- 1918 WWI-- with blue eyes, black hair, wt 120 lbs, ht 5 ft 4 inches on 5 Jun 1917 at 500 Sleepy Drive in St Louis, MO.
how much or little you put under description is up to you-- just play around with the 2 until you find one that works…
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Similar to nkess, I have a custom fact type called Military Draft Registration. I use point form sentences, so my sentence is a little different, namely.
( a new line character goes here to start the fact on a new line)
<b>Military Draft registration:</b> <[Date:plain]><, [PlaceDetails] [Place:plain]>.
I also transcribe the entire draft registration document into the note for the fact. The really good stuff is really in the note.
Thanks everyone for the great ideas.
Jerry–would you please show us an example of how this fact sentence appears in a narrative report? I understand everything in the fact sentence EXCEPT the use of < b> before and after Military Draft registration and the fact that [person] is not in yours…
I would also include the transcription in the notes BUT do realize that IF the person is sending their info up to Ancestry–it just that Ancestry has a limit of abt 100 words between the notes and description–so it may NOT all show up there…
The example you requested will be at the end of this message.
The <b>…</b> combination serves to make the intervening text appear in bold. RM actually uses the same technique in notes to make text bold. However, you don’t type the <b>…</b> yourself in notes. Instead, you highlight the text that you want to be rendered in bold font and then you click the big B icon for bold. You can’t actually see the <b>…</b> in the note, but they are there. What you see is the effect, and the effect is text appear as bold.
RM uses the same technique in notes for italics, viz. <i>…</i> and for underline, viz., <u>…</u> Again, you can’t see the codes in RM’s notes but you can see the effect of the codes. So in addition to being able to make text bold in sentence templates, you can also make text into italics in sentence templates or to be underlined in sentence templates if the need should ever arise.
Not that it particularly matters to this particular discussion, but if you export a GEDCOM from RM using the Note Formatting (Bold, Etc.) option, then you can see those codes throughout your GEDCOM whenever you use them in notes or in sentence templates. A program importing such GEDCOM might or might not understand the codes. So you should include the codes in GEDCOM only if the program that is going to import the GEDCOM will understand the codes.
I realize that most RM users don’t put these kinds of codes into their sentence templates, but lots of RM users use bold, italics, and/or underline in their notes. So when it comes to making GEDCOM, just remember that if you format your notes then those codes will be in your GEDCOM if you use the Note Formatting (Bold, Etc.) option when you are exporting your GEDCOM.
Because all my sentences are point form, I don’t use the [Person] variable for any fact except for the Birth fact. So a person’s name only appears once in their section of narrative reports, namely at the beginning of their section. Well, if you sometimes use Christening as the first fact instead of Birth, then you might have to worry about including the [Person] variable in the sentence for the Christening fact. I don’t use Christening in that manner, but some users do.
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I generally add < [person:Age]> at the end of many of my edited facts so I know the age of the person when an event took place.
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