How to...

Record Flags

Record Flags vs. Fact Flags

Do not confuse record flags with fact flags.  Here are some key differences:

Be aware that it is possible though to have record flags which have the same name as fact flags - in fact, by default, there is a built-in record flag called 'Private'.  There is also a 'Private' fact flag.

About Record Flags

Family Historian comes with only 2 built-in record flags. These are:

The Private flag is used to mark Individuals who you wish to be excluded from reports, from a website you are creating, or from a family tree CD or DVD you want to make. The Living flag is used mark Individuals who are currently alive. You can use this for various purposes. A common requirement is to only show basic details - no events or dates - for living people, and you can use the Living flag to do this.

With both Private and Living flags, you need to choose the appropriate options for your report, book, website, CD or DVD, if you wish Individuals who have these flags to be treated specially.

Although there are only 2 built-in record flags, there is no limit on the number of record flags that you can create yourself. Having created a flag, you can then test for its presence in queries and in text schemes. For example, most of the time you can tell what a person's sex is from their name. But sometimes you can't. You could, if you wished have a 'Display Gender' flag. You could set this on all people who have sexually ambiguous names. Then in a diagram text scheme you could include information about a person's sex, but make it conditional upon the 'Display Gender' flag being set (see How to Change the Contents of Boxes in Diagrams).

Here are just a few suggestions of things you might wish to create a record flag to record:

As well as making any line of text in a diagram conditional upon the presence of a record flag, you can also make any box feature conditional upon the presence of a record flag (see Diagram Options Dialog: Boxes Tab). So you could have a flag for 'Died of a heart attack' if you wished, and put a thick red surround with a yellow background (or whatever you wanted) on boxes for people who have this flag. Or you could create one flag for each of the censuses, and display an icon (another box feature - this is a little image that appears below a box) for each census. Then in any diagram, you could see at a glance, which people have been found in which census.