For Census events I have stopped using “Census (fam)” and am slowing converting old “Census (fam)” events to Census events. After entering all the people who share an event in birth order, I will double check the shared list by comparing it to the list of children in the family. It annoys me that the list of people sharing an event is reordered to an alphabetical list. Is there a reason for this?
I cannot reproduce your results. When I share events in a particular order, they seem to stay in that order. I had identical results in RM7 and RM8.
I wonder if you can describe your process in a little more detail. There must be something different about your process as compared to what I did. In my case, I shared an 1850 census for the father Adison Leath with his sons William Leath born in 1843 and Thomas Leath born in 1844. I used the role of son. The two sons stayed in the order in which I entered them in the shared fact list, even though Thomas would sort in front of William in alphabetic order.
The shared facts printed properly for the sons using the role sentence of Son. I also added the [Son] variable to the Census fact itself and it expanded to list both sons in the order in which I had entered them. So the sons were in the order I entered them everywhere they could appear.
I know that nobody wants to hear this, but the process of sharing these facts was much, much harder in RM8 than in RM7. It’s the same old story - too much slip sliding away, too much clicking, the data you need to see is not on the screen when you need to see it, and the panels you are working in are far too small.
- From the Family window I double click to open the Edit window.
- I create an Census event (using “+” option) for the person.
- I add a source by clicking on “sources” under Person items.
- I share the Census event by clicking on “Shared” under Person items.
- first with the wife by clicking on Share fact.
- then with all the children by clicking on Share fact (multiple).
I have done a screen capture the Family and Edit windows after completion and will try to
attach it.
I did it again, this time the way I think you described. In so doing I did not have any control over the order of the family members and they indeed were alphabetic. Which is to say I chose the Share Fact (Multiple) option, followed by Mark, followed by Family.
When I had control over the order, I had done it with Share Fact without the multiple option and I did them one at a time.
That makes some sense, as the SW would need to keep track of the order multiple people are selected. Thanks for figuring it out. Would be nice if the sorting was based on birth date, but that would require more effort. alpha sort is the easiest.
In my test case, it was worse than that. Since I used the Family option in the selection process after choosing the Multiple option, I selected the whole family all in one go. Therefore, there was no selection order to be maintained. In fact, I had to uncheck the head of household and his wife before clicking the Select button because the head of household shouldn’t have been selected at all and his wife needed a different role.
But even if I had done it without using the Family option after choosing the Multiple option, the selections are not actually processed until you click the Select button. By that time, there is no way to determine the order in which the people had been checked.
I have verified to my satisfaction that the behaviors of the Multiple option and the Family option in RM’s Marking dialog are the same between RM7 and RM8. When RM8 was first released, it didn’t have the Multiple option and it was added in a few updates later due to user requests. It makes me wonder how many RM7 users of the Multiple option were getting family members in the “wrong” order with respect to shared facts and didn’t notice it.
I make very limited use of RM’s shared facts. One example is that I have a Parents fact to print in reports and to provide a place to attach evidence of a person’s parents. The Parents fact is then shared with both the father and mother using a Birth of Child role. That makes the births of the children show up in narrative reports for each individual. The Parents fact has the same date as the Birth fact and is placed after the Birth fact using sort dates.
Just to keep my reports consistent, I am very careful to share the Parents fact without using the Multiple option and by always sharing the Parents fact first with the father and second with the mother. When you first posted your message, I had forgotten that I had adopted my procedure because of the Parents getting in the wrong order when I used the Multiple option. But I don’t share the Census fact, so I hadn’t encountered the problem of the whole family getting out of order with shared facts.