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Concatenating Sentences

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I really like the feature of being able to add the code [+] to a burial sentence to link it to a death sentence ("John died on 16 Sep 1872 and was buried on 18 Sep 1872") and I've added it to many of my "people." My question is whether I should just universally enable this feature by modifying the default burial sentence instead of selectively modifying individual local burial sentences. I can't think of any drawbacks, but I thought I should first ask all of you for your advice before I made such a dramatic change.

 

Also, if your advice is that it's OK to go ahead with changing the default burial sentence, then I'll need help constructing a filter to find the few hundred local burial sentence changes that I've already made so that I can "unmodify" them and use the new default burial sentence.

 

John

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How is this done?

i read thru the help and see the option but how to I get it to connect with the sentence i want it to? such as death and burial? and then print in the journal?

 

thanks

Kristina

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I really like the feature of being able to add the code [+] to a burial sentence to link it to a death sentence ("John died on 16 Sep 1872 and was buried on 18 Sep 1872") and I've added it to many of my "people." My question is whether I should just universally enable this feature by modifying the default burial sentence instead of selectively modifying individual local burial sentences. I can't think of any drawbacks, but I thought I should first ask all of you for your advice before I made such a dramatic change.

I can think of a few possible issues:

 

1. If you happen to have a burial tag but no death tag, the burial tag will be coupled to whatever tag happens to be before it.

 

2. If you are using the Journal with the BMDB first option, any "alt-birth" tags will appear before the burial tag no matter what their sort dates, and it will get combined with the last of them.

 

3. If you don't use the BMDB first option or use a report other than the Journal, and have other tags between the death and burial tags (maybe obituaries, or funeral?) the burial tag will get combined with the last of them.

 

4. If you have a death tag with a lot of information in the Memo, combining the burial tag with the last sentence from the death tag may not work well.

 

If these don't happen very often, you may find it more convenient to make the combined version the default and manually fix those cases that cause issues.

 

Also, if your advice is that it's OK to go ahead with changing the default burial sentence, then I'll need help constructing a filter to find the few hundred local burial sentence changes that I've already made so that I can "unmodify" them and use the new default burial sentence.

I'd think that a List of Events report, with this filter should work:

 

Tag Type... Label = BURIAL AND

Any Witness... Sentence(local) Is not empty END

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How is this done?

i read thru the help and see the option but how to I get it to connect with the sentence i want it to? such as death and burial? and then print in the journal?

My article on Combining Output Sentences may help - it discusses the issue at more length and offers some examples. It also offers some cautions on using the technique.

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You're welcome.

 

Yes, the tags have to be sorted one after the other in the report. Anything that disrupts this will cause a problem, including lack of sort dates, the BMDB first setting, or omitting tags by use of any of the many report options that control which tags appear in the report.

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Thanks Terry.

 

I knew you'd come up with some good reasons for me to be cautious before universally using a [+]. I'll take the time to reflect on the issues you raised to be sure I don't cause problems for myself down the road. And thanks too for the filter.

 

John

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