I am in the process of entering Civil War pension papers for a person that requested his pension in 1877, died in 1903 and then his widow requested the widows pension, and she died in 1919. Quite a number of papers AND multiple witnesses. I recognize some of the witnesses as family members and some with names that are familiar, but I haven’t yet tied to the family line and not currently in my database.
All that being said; I intended on sharing the pension fact with the widow which would add the fact to her also. I didn’t want to do that with the witnesses, because I don’t want the fact to show on their time line for the ones that are in my database. In using the share option of ‘just type name’ for someone not in my database, of course, doesn’t show that person in my index AND I don’t see anyway that I can ‘find’ that witness unless going directly to the person with the fact and going to the share list.
So I started thinking about doing this with the Associations list, and creating a new Association and being able to display the Associate list. However, you can’t add an associate person who is not already in the data base. So back to the sharing of the fact.
So my actual question is this: Once I enter the fact and share with a witness who is not in my database, is there anyway that I can then search/report/something to be able to see who is shared with a fact - or even one who is in my data base? Second part: Is there a way to prevent the fact from showing up in the time line of a witness who IS in my database?
I don’t want to enter into my database someone that I have no other information other than that person was a witness to the signing of the applicant’s signature/mark.
I would add the person and use the Association fact. That way you can keep track of them. You can turn off the display of Association facts on the Edit Person screen under the 3 dot menu, Options, Show Associations. If you just add them as a name under a shared event you won’t be able to find them again.
The short answer to your core question is “no”. There are workarounds such as Renee’s suggestion, but the core answer is “no”.
RM11’s newly enhanced Advanced Search does support searching for people who share a role with a fact. This is a big improvement over no search capability at all for shared facts. But is does have to be for people in your database.
When using Just add a name,
If you add a note ( fact note or general note) to the primary person of the fact that says something like Joe Smith was a witness on his pension then you can search for Joe Smith using find everywhere and the note will appear-- you can also edit the note from this search.
The only way to do this is to use Just Add Name-- even on those who already are in your database BUT you have to add his name to the notes of the primary fact person or you will only know he was a witness by accessing the fact..
As for finding out who you shared a fact with ( in your database not the Just add name option ), you can use Advanced Search in RM 11-- ( it can also be done in RM 10 but I would have to figure out again how we did it)..
it will tell you who and you can edit it from there BUT suggest you limit your search to just one or two specific facts-- otherwise you get the info for everybody who has a shared fact and you have to figure out what was shared with each person…
If you don’t mind it showing up in the timeline of the person in your database, you could mark it as private and it won’t show up in reports, gedcoms etc as long as you uncheck add private facts to reports etc …
I don’t usually even record the info for the person who witnessed the signature (UNLESS I recognize the name) as these are usually a person associated with the courts/government / clergy( pensions/ wills/land docs, marriage license etc) --I do record the names of all other witnesses at the very least in my notes BUT if I run across someone who was a witness to a lot of marriages/ wills etc, I will note that fact also..
As Renee says Associations would work great for this–only problem is that it’s restricted to RM–shared facts may or may NOT transfer to other programs ( BUT NOT ANCESTRY)-- you could also use COPY FACT BUT if I used this, I would make a customized fact that if NOT marked private would transfer to other programs…
I had failed to notice this part of the question on my first read of this thread. Let me give a slightly different perspective. The answer is actually a qualified “yes”, but we need to understand the situation very completely.
Let’s suppose we add to the Birth fact a role called Midwife. For modern births, we likely have little or no reason to record the name of the medical professional who attends a birth, even if the medical professional is a modern day midwife rather than a doctor. But for some historical births, the name of the local woman who served as the midwife for a birth might be interesting. I even have one birth in my database where the midwife was a man.
So we create the midwife role. And we modify the Birth sentence with the [MidWife] variable so that a BIrth sentence reads something the following: John Doe was born 7 Nov 1873 in Bell County Kentucky. The midwife who attended the birth was Sarah Jones.
The text we add to the Birth sentence is something like the following. <The midwife who attended the birth was [MidWife].> We put all the additional text we added to the birth inside angle brackets so that it doesn’t appear in the Birth sentence for people whose Birth isn’t shared using the MidWife role.
Obviously, to make this happen, we have to do more than just create the MidWife role. We actually have to share John Doe’s Birth fact with Sarah Jones using the MidWife role. And let’s suppose that Sarah Jones is a real person in our data base rather than being “just a name”. Doesn’t that place the MidWife event into Sarah’s timeline? This is where it gets tricky. Yes it does in a sense, and there is an option in the Edit Person screen where we can enable or disable the display of such shared roles. But based on what we have done so far, absolutely nothing about being a midwife for the birth of John Doe would show up in narrative reports for Sarah Jones. That’s because we haven’t defined a sentence for the MidWife role.
Not defining a sentence for the MidWife role could be an accidental oversight. Or it could be an intentional decision. It depends on what we want. We can add a role and make a change to the sentence for the Principal that includes the role, and also add a sentence for the role. Or we could just add a sentence for the role without changing the sentence for the Principal. Or we could just change the sentence for the Principal without adding a sentence for the Role. It all depends on what we are trying to accomplish.
