My guess is that Renee’s suggestion is the correct one. Namely, RM’s narrative reports only carry a person forward to the next generation if the person has at least one spouse or at least one child. So I suspect that your person who is not being carried forward has no children and doesn’t have a spouse. The way RM decides which people are carried forward is very standards compliant. So it seems unlikely to change.
I have a solution to force a person in an RM narrative report forward to the next generation even when they don’t have a spouse or child, but my solution requires programming skills and the execution of an SQLite script. So I normally don’t like to mention it. In this case, I’ll describe how I do it, but let me first give a little background.
For the most part I produce narrative reports from RM as printed “books” to take to family reunions. As such, there are no privacy concerns and everybody wants everybody included, especially their own grandchildren. For such children, it’s usually the case that the only information I have for them is their name and their birth date and place. So I really don’t want them to be carried forward. It would just repeat the same information that’s already been printed without adding anything additional. And it would add a lot of unnecessary paper to my printed “books”.
There is software on the market that creates narrative reports that always carries everybody forward to the next generation which would solve your problem but which I would not want to use for my narrative reports. Instead, I want to be able to pick and choose the people with neither a spouse or a child who are carried forward.
I should explain that I don’t print reports for family reunions directly from my production RM database. Instead, I make a full copy of my production database and I call it a reporting database. I do several crazy things to such a reporting database just before I print that I would never dare do to my production database. So rather than doing the crazy things to my production database, then printing, then restoring my production database from a backup. I just make a reporting database. As soon as I print the report, I delete the reporting database and there is no adverse impact at all to my production database.
I also should explain that the actual criterion for carrying a person forward in RM’s narrative report is that the person be the member of a “family”. In this context, a family is two people who are a couple and children need not be involved. They often are married, but from RM’s point of view, they do not need to be married to be a couple. And RM calls them spouses whether they are married or not.
The way children can become involved is that if a child is added to a person with no spouse, RM creates a family for the parent with the other parent being null. Therefore, either the addition of a spouse or the addition of a child to a person creates a family, and it is the existence of the family which triggers the person to be carried forward in a narrative report.
What I do in my production database is add a dummy child to every person that I want to be carried forward to the next generation in reports. I use the same dummy child over and over again. Then in my reporting database, I use SQLite to break the link between the dummy child and all the “parents” to whom he has been linked as a “child”. But I don’t remove the families for all those people, even though the family is one actual person and one null person… Then I print my reports. The selected people still are in a family with a null spouse and are carried forward even though they don’t have a actual spouse or a child. And finally I delete the reporting database because it contains a corrupted data structure and I don’t want to confuse it with my production database.
You can’t accomplish the same thing just using RM because deleting the last child from a parent with a null spouse will also delete the family containing the null spouse.
I actually don’t have to do this dummy child thing very often. More typically, a person has an actual spouse or actual children or both, so they are carried forward automatically. Or the person has no spouse and no children and has very little data and I don’t want them carried forward. Therefore, it’s only the relatively rare person who has no spouse and no children that has enough data to merit this special treatment to be carried forward.
Sorry for all the details, but I know of no other way to get a person with no spouse and no children to be carried forward. I wish RM supported a simple way to mark the people to be carried forward in narrative reports even if they don’t have parents or children. But such a feature does not exist.
