I meant to comment in support of a feature request that I thought I saw here recently but now cannot find so I’m posting something similar anew. But it’s not a new request and was well described and justified originally in 2009:
Posted 09 March 2009 - 06:23 PM
I like the new shared fact feature in version 4. One thing I would like to see is when you click on Share to share the fact the selection list would have the immediate family members at the top of the list. By immediate family I mean parents, step-parents, siblings, and half-siblings.
In my experience the times I have had to duplicate a fact for more than one person it has 99% of the time been for an immediate family member. While I can scroll and pick out the family members form the list it begins to get tedious when working with a large database.
This request has been echoed but expressed in different ways over the years, most recently in this forum in:
and in
None of these has been confirmed by @rzamor1 so herewith the request.
Some might say that the “Share fact (multiple)” option responded to the request. In a laborious and error-prone way, it does but it could be done so much better for the user. Because the family of the Principal (as child or as parent) is the likeliest target of sharing, the members should be presented together in a check-list through which each may be selected and role assigned from the drop-down list. Ideally, their relationships to the Principal should also be displayed in the list.
Currently, RM9 opens RM Explorer on the alphabetically first person in the database, not even on the Principal. If you Mark the family, the members are scattered throughout the index and cannot be seen in a family cluster, making it harder to unmark those with whom the fact should not be shared. All those marked are also assigned the default role and it is necessary to change it via the Principal’s Edit Person > Shared with > Edit Witness form.
Someone may have a better concept for an efficient flow or may have cause to argue against the request. And some issues such as control over the order in which witnesses are listed is another matter that needs to be addressed.
In the RM4 through the RM7 world, you wouldn’t even have needed to have the immediate family at the top of the pick list. It would have been sufficient to have the person whose fact you were sharing highlighted in the pick list. That’s because the selection mechanism in RM4 through RM7 showed you the immediate family members of the selected person in such a way that you could easily move to and select the family members. Sadly, that selection mechanism seems to be completely gone in RM9.
Therefore, some other way would need to be implemented in RM9 to make it easier to pick immediate family members for the sharing of facts. Such a feature would be very helpful to my work. In my use of shared facts, 100% of the people with whom I share a fact are immediate family members.
Thanks for your supportive comment, even before I finished the post having caused a partial draft to be inadvertently posted when I used Ctrl+Enter in attempting to put a blank line between paragraphs within a block quote. Oops…
Good timing on this message as I was working on this tonight with census. If anyone has used Ancestral Sources with Family Historian – this Family can be easy added to sources/facts.
Mayne these is already something someone close.
(The family view)
If a version of this could be used to do a multiple shared (and even better if if could add relationship) Son/daughter etc.
