General Topics

Witnesses

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).  With 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 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.  A fact that has one or more witnesses associated with it, is sometimes also called a Shared Event.

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 Window, which you can do by selecting the fact in the Facts tab of the Property Box, and clicking on the Witnesses button on the toolbar, below the list.  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. If a person is both a principal and a witness, the sentence generated for the person will be their witness sentence.  You might say that witness sentences eclipse principal sentences.  You don't get both (but there are subtleties which we will look into in more detail below).

If a person is a witness more than once, you will get a generated sentence for each of their occurrences as a witness.  For principals, if not also a witness, the sentence generated for them will use the principal sentence template associated with that event.  For non-principal witnesses, and for principals that are also witnesses, the sentences will use the relevant witness sentence template.

Why might you want to add a person as a witness more than once?  Suppose for example a person is both an executor and a beneficiary of a will.  By listing them as a beneficiary, you can include them in lists of beneficiaries. 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".  This will only work if the person has a role as beneficiary.  But you will still want to also record the fact they were the executor of the will.

In our example, how will the event be reported for the person who is both executor and beneficiary?  In that case, they will get two very similar sentences about their two roles in the will.  Such sentences may not look very good in a report.  How can you improve the way the report reads?  One option is to override the 2 sentences and effectively combine them.  How can you do that?

Defining and OVerriding Sentence Templates

Sentences in narrative reports are created using Sentence Templates, which contain special Sentence 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 window, when the appropriate witness is selected. To edit a sentence field, simply click in the field, or click on the button to the right of the field and choose the 'Edit' option from the dropdown menu that appears.

Whenever you change 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 Sentence Template Codes will be displayed as codes (rather than showing their replacement values). Sentence 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. 

To reset an overridden field back to its original default, you can either just delete the contents of the field, or click on the button to the right of the sentence field, and choose 'Reset Sentence' from the menu that appears.  The background of the field will turn back from white to dusty brown when you do this.

How can you combine two sentences?  Effectively you do this by excluding one of the sentences (so it doesn't appear in narrative reports) and modifying the other.  So for example, suppose the 2 sentences by default have the following sentence templates

All you need do is override the first sentence to read (say):

and you mark the second sentence to be excluded from narrative reports.  To mark as sentence to be excluded, click the button to the right of the sentence and choose 'Exclude Sentence' from the dropdown menu that appears.  This will override the sentence and replace its contents with the special code "{blank}", which will prevent that sentence from appearing in reports.

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.

Witness Priority vs. Principal Priority

We saw earlier that if a person is recorded as a witness to an event in which they are also the principal, their role as witness will take priority in narrative reports, and it is the witness sentence that will be displayed for them.  We said that witness sentences eclipse principal sentences.  You don't get both.  This is called witness priority. 

The concepts of witness priority or principal priority are only applicable where you have an event where a person is both principal and witness.  If, for a given fact, there are no witnesses, or there are witnesses but none of them are also the principal (or one of the principals), then it doesn't mean anything to talk about witness priority or principal priority - the concepts do not apply.

As we have seen, by default, if a person is both principal and witness, witness priority applies.  However, you can force principal priority to apply if you want to.  Let's say, for example, that you want to record the bride and groom as witnesses to a marriage event, alongside the bridesmaids, best man and other roles.  That is to say, you want to add 'Bride' and 'Groom' as role types for the marriage event, and add the two principals as witnesses with these roles.  Let's also suppose that you want narrative reports to use the ordinary principal sentence for the marriage and not the witness sentence for the bride and groom witnesses (as displayed in the Witnesses Window) - that is, you want principal priority to apply.  To achieve this, you just need to mark the sentences for the bridge and groom witnesses in the Witnesses window as 'excluded'.  If a principal has one or more roles as a witness to their own event, but they are all marked as 'excluded', the fact will be displayed in narrative sentences using the principal sentence template - i.e. using principal priority.