Shared roles, sentences, and sources

RootsMagic
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I just made a curious discovery that I should have made years ago.

I make limited use of RM’s shared roles for the purpose of enhancing the appearance of narrative reports for family reunions. The example that presently is of interest is that I added a role called NamedFor to RM’s built-in Namesake fact. RM’s default sentence for the Namesake fact is in the vein of

[Person] was named after [Desc]

In other words, you fill in the name of a person’s namesake in the Description field of the Namesake fact and the person’s namesake appears in narrative reports. I realized years ago that the Description field of any fact is just text and therefore a person’s namesake did not appear in the Name index at the end of my reports. As a result, I added a NamedFor role to the NameSake fact and changed the sentence for the Namesake fact to something in the vein of

[Person] was named after [NamedFor]

This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but person named in the NamedFor role is included in the Name index if the role is shared with the person who actually is the namesake. Happy, happy, happy.

Another possibility is that you can define a sentence for the NamedFor role. For example, suppose Andrew William Doe was named for his father John Andrew Doe and suppose you defined a sentence for the NamedFor] role in the vein of

[Person] was named after [ThisPerson]

With these sentences in place and the Namesake sentence shared appropriately, both the father and the son would get a sentence like the following.

Andrew William Doe was named for John Andrew Doe.

Surely these sentences can be improved upon a bit, but these examples explain the technical details and we finally get to my curious discovery. Very much on purpose, I left the sentence for the NamedFor role completely null. That meant that the sentence for the Namesake fact worked correctly as described above and resulted in the person’s namesake being included in the Name index at the end of my reports.

That also meant that nothing about the father being the namesake of the son appeared in the timeline for the father, which was what I wanted. Except that something does in appear in the timeline for the father, and that’s my curious discovery. Namely, if the original Namesake fact for the son has a citation, the same citation superscript for the shared NamedFor role appears in the timeline for the father. But because there is no sentence for the NamedFor role, the citation superscript is just sort of floating around in the timeline for the father, not connected to anything. I guess it seems to me that there shouldn’t be a citation superscript which appears for a null sentence.

I’m highly doubtful that this “problem” will be accepted as a problem and fixed. So I’m trying to think about how to form a role sentence for the NamedFor role that will actually make sense in narrative reports. There may be a way to do so, but I haven’t figured it out yet. In case it matters, my actual sentence for the Namesake fact is as follows.

(a carriage return goes here)
<b>Namesake: </b><[NamedFor]|[Desc]>.

There is a value switch in the sentence so that it uses the NamedFor variable if the Namesake fact has been shared and it uses the Description field if the Namesake fact has not been shared.

By the way, this issue of floating citations superscripts not connected to anything will happen for any shared roles where the role has been shared only in support of the original fact sentence and where the role sentence has been left null and where the original fact sentence has one or more citations. I don’t like citation superscripts just floating around and connected to nothing. Another option would be not to have a citation for the Namesake fact, but I don’t like doing that, either.

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Just on a lark, I tried the following as the sentence for the NamedFor role for the NameSake fact. Remember that all my sentences are point form sentences.

(a carriage return goes here)
<b>Namesake of: </b><[Person]|[Desc]><, [Date:plain]>.

The effect on my narrative reports is very nice. I already assign a person’s birth date to a person’s Namesake fact with sort dates to place the Birth fact before the Namesake fact. And all the NamedFor roles are already shared with the actual namesake person as described above. So I didn’t have to go around to hundreds or thousands of people in my database to mess around with their Namesake facts. I just had to define a sentence for the NamedFor role and I was done. And I no longer have the citations floating around in the air for the NamedFor role.

However, I still think there are cases where you might want to define a role for a fact and to share the role with other people without defining a sentence for the role. Rather, the rolename variable would appear in the sentence for the original fact and there would be no role sentence. Under these circumstances, I don’t think you would want a citation superscript to appear floating around where the null role sentence appears in narrative reports.

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Thanks, Jerry: I use Share Facts for my DNA Matches. I created a fact called “MRCA”. I assign it to my ## Grandfather, I then add his wife (my ## Grandmother) to a Role I added, “MRCA”. Then I add myself as the first “DNA_Tester”. I add my DNA matches as “DNA_Tester”. Thanks to your post, I have created the following sentences:
For Principal -
(a carriage return goes here)
[person] and [MRCA] were flagged as the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) in a [Place], [PlaceDetails:Plain], DNA Match of [DNA_Tester].

For MCRA -(a carriage return goes here)
[person] and [ThisPerson] were flagged as the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) in a [Place], [PlaceDetails:Plain], DNA Match of [DNA_Tester].

For DNA_Tester -
(a carriage return goes here)
A DNA match [Place], [PlaceDetails:Plain], the [Desc] side; [ThisPerson:NoCycle] and [DNA_Tester], has the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of [Person] & [MRCA].
The Result:
A DNA match in Ancestry, Autosomal, the Maternel side; David Curtis Slatter and Nancy C???, Jamie C???, mhafley82 H???, Sarah H???, Traci S???, Delaney H???, Paula H???, Gay Ann B???, and heatherf29 F???, has the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) of Rev. Marquis De Lafayette Wilkinson :small_blue_diamond: & Sarah Eliza Robbins.