Choice of marriage witnesses

[VTinOZ]

Does anyone capture witnesses as Facts in their trees? If yes, did you create a custom Fact, what sort of info do you capture?

I use RY3 (Relatively Yours 3) which has a 'participant' function with every event recorded, where you then add the name, tick if a known family member or not, add whatever comment you wish, eg Mother of the Bride or Witness etc. RY3 links all participants to the event & all that shows on screen or in whatever report I'm doing to save or print.
I use it to record everyone that is involved in every event be it BDM, Census, whatever the event. I like that I only have to record to one person & the program does all the linking to other family members, which saves me lots of typing.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Does anyone capture witnesses as Facts in their trees? If yes, did you create a custom Fact, what sort of info do you capture?

I added a custom Witness fact to my tree also FTM, I typically record the date and text such as "Death of William Bisset, Father". The GEDCOM gets exported as

1 NAME Annie Henderson /Bisset/
...
1 EVEN Marriage of William Bisset, half-brother, and Hannah Hall
2 TYPE Witness
2 DATE 05 SEP 1923
2 SOUR @S941@

This form of Witness fact is also recognised by FTAnalyzer and is used as proof the person must have been alive at that date in order to have been able to be a witness. Thus it affects the loose birth and loose death reports etc.

 

[Bryman]

The existing fields within GenoPro get exported in the gedcom file as

0 @fam000nn@ FAM
...
1 MARR
2 DATE dd mmm yyyy
2 TYPE Religious Marriage
2 PLAC town, county, country
2 AGNC Vicar abc
2 NOTE [Witnesses: xyz]

so probably not very useful for FTA. There doesn't appear to be an appropriate tag for witnesses.

Note: Within the drop down list of permitted marriage officiator titles, Registrar is not an option (for Civil Marriages) but Midwife is!

 

[Alexander Bisset]

so probably not very useful for FTA. There doesn't appear to be an appropriate tag for FTAnalyzer

Unfortunately you are right the witness tag needs to be against the individual who did the witnessing otherwise in this format it would need to be a reference code to the person doing the witnessing. I suspect it's just the name of the person who may or may not be in your tree. Thus it isn't being treated as a fact for the person doing the witnessing as they may not even exist in the tree.

If it was a reference field and it was guaranteed to always be someone in the tree then I could add code to cope with that format. However if it's just a name and I don't know if the person exists or not then it's very difficult to match up. Eg: it may be simple enough if it's an unusual name and you only have one of them but what if it just says [Witnesses: John Smith] how does the program know which John Smith in your tree it is?

 

[Bryman]

Unfortunately you are right the witness tag needs to be against the individual who did the witnessing otherwise in this format it would need to be a reference code to the person doing the witnessing. I suspect it's just the name of the person who may or may not be in your tree. Thus it isn't being treated as a fact for the person doing the witnessing as they may not even exist in the tree.

If it was a reference field and it was guaranteed to always be someone in the tree then I could add code to cope with that format. However if it's just a name and I don't know if the person exists or not then it's very difficult to match up. Eg: it may be simple enough if it's an unusual name and you only have one of them but what if it just says [Witnesses: John Smith] how does the program know which John Smith in your tree it is?

I agree with your analysis/conclusion but was just lamenting the fact that without a defined format (in the Gedcom standard) for witness information, this would be difficult for FTA to process, other than via a custom fact for each witness in FTM as implemented by you.