Witness question

[DanDennison84 0]

Hi everyone. Since everyone has been so helpful, I thought I'd post another question before I get too much further into reorganizing my tree. I'm wondering what the best practice is for the use of Witness? If I have a census, should I add the head of house as primary and everyone else in the household as witnesses? If I do that, should I also enter separate census tags for each person or not? I guess the same would apply to things like residence tags and the like. I'm unsure when to use Witness and when not to, even after reading all the guides.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Dan, I would offer these thoughts...

 

The only reason not to use Witnesses is if you absolutely, positively, must export these events to GEDCOM - that medium cannot accommodate Witnesses, and the information conveyed is thus lost. My recommendation is to avoid exporting by GEDCOM except for cases where you want to export only the most basic information - names, relationships, birth, marriage and death information for example. Otherwise, by all means use Witnesses.

 

It makes little or no sense to enter a person in a Tag as a Witness and then create another Tag for the same event for that person. If you create a Census Tag for a household, for example, and enter all the members of the household as Principals or Witnesses, there is no need to create separate Census Tags for each person in addition.

 

At a minimum, using Witnesses avoids the effort of adding multiple Tags for the same event, and makes it easy to see (if you open the Tag or use the Associates Window) who all was involved. But better, if you craft Sentences that refer to the Witnesses, your narratives can mention the other participants in reports.

 

I use Witnesses extensively in Census Tags (entering both the official head of household and spouse as Principals if both are named in the record), for and also for Will Tags, Moved Tags, and Immigration Tags. I use them often for other events that involve more than two people entered in my database.

 

There is a detailed discussion on the use of Witnesses in Census tags on my website - see link below.

[DanDennison84 0]

Ok Terry, that is kind of what I thought, but just wanted to double-check. I've put your book on my xmas list as well =)