Jerry Bryan

It's hard to tell for sure what happened after the marriage fact has been deleted and re-entered, but I have a pretty strong suspicion. I suspect that the marriage fact was shared with person 497 and was not shared with person 502. You can do that if you wish, but it's not something you would normally do on purpose. I can't picture how it might have happened by accident. But for example, is it possible that this data came into your database from ancestry.com via TreeShare or anything like that? Or have you been playing around with shared marriage facts? Or did you maybe import these people into your database from some other RM user?

No matter how it happened, the way to resolve the problem was probably to click on the "main" marriage fact and then to click on the Share button in the Marriage Details panel towards the lower right of the Edit Person screen. Within the shared fact dialog, you should have seen that person 497 shared the fact and person 502 didn't, so you could have clicked the Remove button to remove the sharing of the fact from person 497 without removing the fact itself.

Jerry

Wonder if R8 will have anything new on the "copy events" front......similar to share but just straight memorize and paste??

There is no way to know until RM8 is released or until more information is previewed prior to the release.

I think a "copy events" is very much needed, but equally I would like to see improvements in the way shared facts are supported. In particular, there might be times when shared facts would be better than "copy events" if only shared facts would act more like real facts after they are shared. Both improvements are needed, and neither improvement should be viewed as obviating the need for the other.

While really needed, "copy events" would have sort of the same issue RM has with groups being static instead of dynamic and the same issue RM has with citations being static instead of dynamic after they are memorized and pasted. It appears from the preview that RM8 includes a "shared citation" facility (although I don't know if that is what it will be called). That will make citations dynamic so that a correction to a "shared citation" will need to be made only once and all the places it is "shared" will inherit the correction. I would picture "copy events" as being static. Once copied, the copy of the fact and the original would be independent of each other and making a correction to one would not affect the other.

On the other hand, the existing shared fact facility can be either static or dynamic. Shared facts are mostly dynamic. For example, you can change the date or place or citations and the changes will instantly apply as well to all instances where the fact is shared. But you can customize the note. If you do so, the note effectively becomes static. The static/dynamic terminology is not used in RM's help files or tutorials about shared facts, but I think that's effectively what individual customization of notes or not allows you to do. Another weakness of shared facts in my view is that you really don't share a fact. You only share a role that is subordinate to the fact. I think it would be very helpful sometimes really to be able to share the original fact without referring to a role that is being shared.

And I think there is an odd problem in the user interface for shared facts that needs to be fixed and which should be trivial to fix. Suppose you have person's X and Y and suppose person X has a fact A which has a role B and role B is shared with person Y. In the Edit Person screen for person B, the shared fact shows up as fact A rather than as role B. For example, if you share a birth fact for a person with the midwife who attended the birth with the role of Midwife, the fact shows up in the Edit Person screen for the midwife as Birth rather than as Midwife. I find that behavior of the user interface to be very counter intuitive and very confusing. I wish it would be fixed in RM8.

Jerry

..  Merge should be a feature for all major components in the next version or they should hold the software until it is. 

Unfortunately, there is probably a terminology problem of some sort in the way RM users talk about this problem as compared to the way RM developers and RM promotional literature talk about this problem. And the terminology problem is there across nearly all genealogy software products, not just RM.

What I mean is that you will frequently see reviews of genealogy software and you will frequently see comparison charts of features for genealogy software. Somewhere in such comparison charts it will say something about merging. And RM and most of it's competitors will get a big green check mark for the way they handle merging. It's only if you really dig into things that you discover that RM handles only a very thin veneer of what is really needed in the way of merging.  I suspect that the same might also be true of most of RM's competitors. So RM gets the green check mark and probably also do most of its competitors, but users who merge quickly discover that the merge functionality is very inadequate.

RM8 may have major improvements in merging, and then again it may not. If it doesn't, it still needs to get out the door as soon as it is ready and stable. If we have to wait for RM8 until it's perfect, it will never ship. That's just the nature of software. That's why I'm more concerned about what happens with RM8 after it ships and is stable than I am with exactly what's in it or with exactly when it ships.

Jerry

I probably don't understand the issue, but it seems to me that when you use the Free Form template or when you define your own templates you have complete control over the Bibliography sentence. It's only when you use the built-in templates that you have no control over the Bibliography sentence. Is that what we are talking about?

Jerry

I don't quite understand your question. RM's source templates (including the Free Form template) generate three sentences - the footnote sentence, the short footnote sentence, and the bibliography sentence.

• If you request footnotes at the bottom of each page, then RM will use the footnote sentences and the short footnote sentences as numbered citation sentences. No bibliography sentences will appear.
• If you request footnotes at the end of the report (also called endnotes), then RM will use the footnote sentences as numbered citation sentences. No short footnote sentences or bibliography sentences will appear.
• If you request a bibliography, then RM will use the bibliography sentences to create an alphabetized and unnumbered bibliography. These are no citations, and no citation superscripts will appear in the body of your report. No footnote sentences or short footnote sentences will appear.

In the case of both RM's "sources" and RM's "citations", you may include two different free form notes, essentially a note field and a comment field.  What RM actually calls these fields varies a great deal in different places in the RM user interface, so any particular thing I call them is therefore bound to be confusing. The note and comment fields associated with RM's "sources" cannot be included in narrative reports at all - neither as a part of footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography. The note and comment fields associated with RM's "citations" can be included in narrative reports at the bottom of the page in narrative reports as a part of citation footnotes and at the end of reports as a part of citation endnotes. They cannot be included as a part of a bibliography. Unfortunately, there are no source template variables for these note and comment fields. Rather, they are a report option that is all or nothing for every footnote or endnote in the whole report. I'm hoping this problem of no source template variables for the note and comment fields will be fixed in RM8, but we don't yet know if it will be fixed in RM8 or not.

So with all that in mind, could you describe in a little more detail what you want to appear in RM's narrative reports as a footnote?

Jerry