Property Box: Facts Tab

Witnesses Dialog

The Witnesses Dialog shows the witnesses for the fact that is currently selected in the Fact tab of the Property Box.  If you select a different fact in the Fact tab of the Property Box, the Witnesses Dialog will immediately update itself to reflect the new selection.  There is no need to close the Witnesses Dialog before doing this.  Indeed, like the Property Box itself, you never need to close the Witnesses Dialog.  It is designed to work in conjunction with the Property Box and other windows, and will automatically update itself to show correct information at all times.

To open the Witnesses Dialog, select any event or attribute in the Facts tab of the Property Box.  Click on the menu button on the toolbar and choose Witnesses from the dropdown menu that appears.  You can also right-click on any event or attribute and chooses Witnesses from the dropdown context menu that appears.

What are Witnesses (and Principals)?

Every fact (event or attribute) in Family Historian is either an Individual fact (e.g. birth, baptism, occupation, death) or a Family fact (e.g. marriage, divorce).  For Individual facts, the Individual in question is known as the Principal - this is the person being born, being baptised, having the occupation, or dying.  Family facts have up to two Principals.  These are the two people getting married or divorced, etc.  However, many people can have important roles to play in events (and more rarely attributes), over and above the Principals.  For example, you might want to record the minister at a baptism or the executor of a will.  There are many roles you might want to record for a marriage - such as minister, bridesmaid, best man, guest, usher, etc.  Any number of people can have the same role for any given fact.

A person who is involved in an event (or attribute*) in a non-principal role, is called a Witness.  The term Witness should not be taken too literally.  As used in this context, it really just means - anyone involved in a non-principal role in an event.  It is convenient to have a term that covers such people, and Witness is the commonly-used term.

Family Historian defines a number of roles for witnesses, but you can define as many more as you like.  There is no limit.

Some roles are pre-defined, but you can define more - as many as you like.  Roles are defined for particular fact types only.  You can use the same role name for two different facts (e.g. minister at baptism and minister at marriage); but these are nevertheless treated as separate roles and have to be defined separately.

To specify or view who the Witnesses were for any given fact, you have to open the Witnesses dialog, which you can do by right-clicking on the fact in the Facts tab of the Property Box, and choosing the Witnesses option.  You will then be able to add as many Witnesses as you like and specify their roles.  If a person you want to add already has a record in the project, you should select this record.  It may sometimes happen, however, that you wish to record the name of a person who filled a role, but do not wish to create a record for them in the project.  In that case, you can simply specify their name only (you will be offered this choice when you click the 'Add' button).

For each witness, you can add a note and source citations. To add source citations for a witness, make sure that the source pane of the Property Box is open.  When you click on any witness, the Source Pane will show source citations for that witness, and you can add more, or edit existing citations, at that point.

If a person is a Witness in someone else's event (e.g. a bridesmaid at someone's marriage), the fact that they were a Witness at that event will be mentioned in the Property Box when you view the list of facts about them in the Facts tab,  Also, in narrative reports, events in which they had a role as a Witness will be mentioned.

You can add the same person as a witness more than once, for any given event.  You will usually do this when they had more than one role.  For example, the executor of a will might also be a beneficiary.  You can also add a principal as a witness (that is, in a non-principal role) to their own event.

Sentences in Narrative Reports

For each fact, Family Historian will generate a sentence in narrative reports about the people involved.  There are two kinds of sentences: Principal sentences and Witness sentences. Principal sentences define a fact from the point-of-view of the principal (or from the point of view of one of the principals if there are two).  Witness sentences describe a fact from the point-of-view of a witness.  When narrative reports are generated about a given person, they include sentences in which that person participated as a principal or as a witness or both. For any given event in which a person is a principal or a witness or both, each person will only ever get one sentence relating to that event.  For principals, that sentence will be generated using the principal sentence template associated with that event.  For non-principal witnesses, the sentence will use the witness sentence template associated with that person's occurrence as a witness - the first occurrence if there is more than one.

Although each person only gets one sentence for each event in narrative reports, there can still be a benefit in adding them more than once in different roles.  Suppose for example a person is both an executor and a beneficiary of a will.  Their first occurrence as a witness may be in their role as executor.  Nevertheless their role as a beneficiary may still be mentioned in other sentences.  A typical sentence about a beneficiary may also mention all the other beneficiaries - for example, "A was a beneficiary, along with B, C, and D".  When we say that each person only ever gets one sentence (at most) about any given event, we don't mean that there is only ever one sentence in which they are mentioned.  We mean that in a narrative report about them, there is only one sentence that relates to that event.

In our example, how will the event be reported for the person who is both executor and beneficiary?  In that case, the standard sentence template for the 'executor' role will be used to generate a sentence for them.  The standard template for an executor makes no mention of the role as beneficiary.  The template could be modified, of course, but, unless it was done with great care, the modification could potentially change the way all other executors of wills are described in narrative reports.  A probably better (and certainly easier) solution would be to simply override the generated sentence in this one case, to mention the person's other role as beneficiary as well.  All sentences can be easily overridden - see next. 

Defining and OVerriding Sentence Templates

Sentences in narrative reports are created using Sentence Templates, which contain special template codes. Sentence Templates are defined for each fact type, including custom fact types, and can be viewed and modified from the Fact Types Dialog (see 'Fact Types' on the Tools menu).  Each fact type has one sentence template for principal sentences, and one for each role associated with that fact type (for witness sentences).

Whatever sentence template is defined for any given fact type, you may want to override it and change it in any particular case. You can do this for both principal sentences and witness sentences. You can change the former by editing the sentence field at the bottom of the Fact tab of the Property Box. You can change a witness sentence by editing the sentence field at the bottom of the Witnesses Dialog, when the appropriate witness is selected. Whenever you edit a sentence field, the background of the field will turn from dusty brown to white, to show that it is being overridden. While you are editing it, all template codes will be displayed as codes (rather than showing their replacement values). Template codes can be used both when defining sentence templates for fact types and their roles, or when overriding those sentence templates.  To see how your overridden sentence will look in a report (with template codes replaced by real data), click on, or tab to, any field other than the sentence field.

Most template codes can be used in either Principal sentences or Witness sentences - but not all. Where a code can only be used in one context, this will be mentioned in the code description.

Buttons

Add	Add one or more witnesses.  You will be asked if you wish to select one or more Individual records, or create a 'name-only' witness (see discussion above). The Edit Witness Dialog will be opened to allow a new witness to be added for the current fact.  You can select as many Individual records at a time as you like.  If you select more than one, however, the only field you can modify in the Edit Witness Dialog is role.  Other fields will be greyed.
Edit	Edit witness details for the selected witness in the Edit Witness Dialog. You can select multiple witnesses and edit them all in one go.  If you select more than one, however, the only field you can modify in the Edit Witness Dialog is role.  Other fields will be greyed.
Go To	You can choose to view the current fact in the Fact tab of the Property Box for the currently selected witness. Or you can choose to view the current fact in the Fact tab of the Property Box for the principal (or one of them if there are two).  If nothing appears to happen when you choose an option it is probably because you are already viewing the fact in the way requested.
Move Up	Move the selected witness(es) up.
Move Down	Move the selected witness(es) down.
Delete	Delete selected witness(es).