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Question about Individual Narrative Report

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Is there any way to make the births of children appear on the Individual Narrative report? I fully realize the implications of the word "individual", but still, the birth of a child is such a major event in virtually anyone's life that it would seem to me to have a place in their narrative, at least optionally.

 

Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

 

Thanks

Mike

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There is a way, though you might not consider it easy. To make the birth of a child a event in the parent's Individual Narrative, you have to create it as an event tag for the parent (the parent/child relationship tag is not an event tag).

 

The easiest way is to enter the parents as witnesses on the child's birth tag. Use a suitable sentence, and it's all done with the same information already entered in that tag. The downside is that if also use the Journal or one of the other ancestor/descendant narratives, the statement will show up there too. You may or may not find that acceptable.

 

An alternate is to create a custom tag for the parents. That means you need to enter the data from the birth tag again, but you would be able to use it for individual narratives and exclude it from other styles of narratives.

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Why not just run a Journal report? Set it to 'Descendants' and select one generation. That should give you what you want.

 

John

 

 

You are quite right, John. I can do it that way, except then I don't get the benefit of the narrative format, which for this purpose is as important as the actual information contained in the report. That is why I'd like to coax the individual narrative to give me the desired output.

 

Mike

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There is a way, though you might not consider it easy. To make the birth of a child a event in the parent's Individual Narrative, you have to create it as an event tag for the parent (the parent/child relationship tag is not an event tag).

 

The easiest way is to enter the parents as witnesses on the child's birth tag. Use a suitable sentence, and it's all done with the same information already entered in that tag. The downside is that if also use the Journal or one of the other ancestor/descendant narratives, the statement will show up there too. You may or may not find that acceptable.

 

An alternate is to create a custom tag for the parents. That means you need to enter the data from the birth tag again, but you would be able to use it for individual narratives and exclude it from other styles of narratives.

 

Hi Terry

 

You confirmed my suspicions. Of those two options, I like option 2 the best. I had hoped that there was a mechanism built into TMG to allow the births of the children to appear on the report and that I just wasn't seeing it. It interests me that the Individual Detail report has been programmed to show the births of the children on the report, while the Individual Narrative report has not. To your knowledge, has the issue of being able to show the births of children on the narrative report ever been raised with WG? If it hasn't, I would sure like to put it on the wish-list. To me, the optimum would be a check box on the report options form for the narrative report that would allow the births of children to be added to the report (or left off as the case may be).

 

For the present, I will create a custom tag as you suggested, and use the tag selection option in the individual reports to determine where it prints.

 

Thanks for all of your help.

Mike

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To your knowledge, has the issue of being able to show the births of children on the narrative report ever been raised with WG? If it hasn't, I would sure like to put it on the wish-list. To me, the optimum would be a check box on the report options form for the narrative report that would allow the births of children to be added to the report (or left off as the case may be).

You're welcome, Mike.

 

The issue has been raised a number of times.

 

A prime question, seems to me, is just what would appear in the narrative with such an option? Narratives are based on the tag sentences, and there is no tag, and thus no sentence, for that option. Seems to me that a tag-level sentence would be needed. Maybe the one could be added to relationship tag??? I don't really know.

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:o

A prime question, seems to me, is just what would appear in the narrative with such an option? Narratives are based on the tag sentences, and there is no tag, and thus no sentence, for that option. Seems to me that a tag-level sentence would be needed. Maybe the one could be added to relationship tag??? I don't really know.

 

That's an interesting point, and one that I hadn't really thought about. What is really important to me is to be able to say something like "So and So gave birth to her (or fathered his) first child, Who Shall I Call It on such and such date at Somewhere or Other". And obviously, the more sentence structure flexibility, the better. But placing a Sentence button on the relationship tag would make it very powerful indeed, because it could be used for a great many things, and some of them probably unpredictable. Something like that sure would be nice to have, though...

 

Mike

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Is there any way to make the births of children appear on the Individual Narrative report? I fully realize the implications of the word "individual", but still, the birth of a child is such a major event in virtually anyone's life that it would seem to me to have a place in their narrative, at least optionally.

 

Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

 

Thanks

Mike

 

Hi. I too am interested in having an option to at least list the dates and names of children in an individual narrative report.

 

I think the work arounds suggested in this post are cumbersome.

 

Perhaps I could ask WG to consider it in a future revision of the program.

 

Thanks. Stoker Wilson.

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I just saw this thread - and I have had the same problem with the Individual Narrative Report. I just produced a booklet for a family reunion and chose to write an Individual Narrative report of a focus group (my mother's family). They are not interested in seeing a journal report of descendants of one ancestor. That's why the journal doesn't work very well. They like to see all the members of the related family. In order to force at least some child information on the report I added the Num-Child tag to everyone so at least the number of children could be identified.

 

I would really like to have that feature added to the Individual Narrative report - names (at least) of children.

 

Linda Reinfeld

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You are quite right, John. I can do it that way, except then I don't get the benefit of the narrative format, which for this purpose is as important as the actual information contained in the report. That is why I'd like to coax the individual narrative to give me the desired output.

Just to note...

 

Set the Journal report to 1 generation.

On the General tab, select Custom format.

On the Miscellaneous tab, unselect BMDB in a separate paragraph.

 

Now the output of the Journal report is identical to the output of the Individual Narrative report except that the Journal report includes a list of the children (following the narrative).

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Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. That, at least, puts all of the information that I am looking for on the same page, if not in the format that I might have chosen.

 

It still would be nice, though, if the narrative report could have the added flexibility of being able to include sentences about the births of the children.

 

Thanks again,

Mike Daugherty

Frederick, Maryland

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It still would be nice, though, if the narrative report could have the added flexibility of being able to include sentences about the births of the children.

I understand what you are saying but it would be very difficult for children to be handled one way in one type of narrative report and a different way in a different type of narrative report.

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