Witnes names

[Daryl Edmonds 0]

Is there any sentence structure I could use so only the first name of a witness is printed in reports?

 

In particular I'm looking at witnesses in census records. Currently I'm using [W] appeared on the census <[D],> in the household of [P1] <and [P2]><[L]> <[WM]> This outputs as Frederick Ezekiel Edmonds appeared on the census on 06 Jun 1841, in the household of Ezekiel Edmonds in Church Yard, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England son, age 7. I feel this is too formal for most of my purposes, especially when there is more than one census in an individual report, and, as his/her full name is at the start of the report, would prefer it to read Frederick appeared on the census on 06 Jun 1841... etc.

 

I can't see anything in the sentence structure section of Help that would achieve my desired result. I know I can use an individual Census Tag entry for each person but that defeats the purpose of using the Witness feature (and adds to the workload!)

[Terry Reigel 0]

I've run into the same issue. You could use [RF:Witness] instead of [W], but that only works if there is only one Witness, which is not generally the case with Census tags. If there is more than one, you get the first names of all of them.

 

You could create a different Role for each Witness, like Witness, Witness2, Witness3, etc. But that becomes a problem for the statement for the HoH, assuming you want all the witnesses listed in that person's narratives.

 

My solution has been to use He/She instead of the name, like: "He appeared in the census..."

 

If you do this in the Tag type, create a female sentence too with "She..."

 

I find when I have more than a couple of tags for a person even the first name becomes annoyingly repetitive, so I change many of the name mentions to either first names or he/she.

[Daryl Edmonds 0]

Thanks, Terry, I should have thought of that myself!

I've done that with most of the Tags (after Birth) for most principals, with a bit of tweaking here and there; as you say, it makes the output more readable.

[Terry Reigel 0]

You're welcome, Daryl.