Clicking menu on a person in the main window brings up a menu:
Choosing "Edit" or "Child" from this menu will open a tabbed dbox in which details of a person's main life events can be entered.
From the point of view of a genealogist, often doing research in civil vital records or church records, the main events in a life are birth, marriage and death. Of these, marriage affects two people and is not an event of a single life. Birth and death are associated (and may only be recorded as) christenings, baptisms, cremations and burials, and these are the six events currently handled by this dbox. GEDCOM has established tags for a whole host of other life events, and a generic "event" tag for anything else occurring to a person's life on a specific date or within a range of dates. !Family preserves this information in your GEDCOM, but doesn't currently support displaying or editing it.
The first two text fields are Name and Title, which identify this person. Title is optional, and is typically an indication of civil or military rank, usually the final rank achieved during life.
A single check box "Living" can be set to show that a person is believed to be alive on the date the database is being edited. Strictly speaking the tag used to record this is not a part of the GEDCOM standard, but seems to be widely used by a number of genealogy packages. If a proper way of indicating this status is defined in some future version of GEDCOM, this part of the user-interface may change to reflect this.
A line of three radio buttons defines the gender of this person as male, female or unknown.
Two text fields give the names of the parents. Filling in these fields enables the person to be placed correctly in the structure of the family tree. If the parents are already in the database, they must be spelt exactly as they already appear in order to connect the new person correctly. If the dbox was opened as a result of choosing "Child" in a person or family pop-up menu, then they should already be filled in correctly. Getting the spelling wrong here would result in the creation of new people in the database, and it might possibly be some time before the error became apparent. To avoid this when the dbox is opened without these names filled in, name completion or matching is available to enable you to choose from a list of people already in the database. Type the start of the relevant person's name and hit "F1", or the end of the name and hit "F2". If only one person matches, that name will be filled in. If no-one matches, you will hear a beep. If there are multiple matches, a window will open with a list, showing birth/death dates to aid identification of the person you want. The name you typed may also be partially completed as far as can be deduced from the list. Click on one name in the list to fill in the field, or type some more in the original writable icon and hit "F1" or "F2" again.
Below these fields are the six tabs for events. Clicking on a tab brings it to the front, so that the fields may be filled in. In all cases, these fields include a date and time, a place (down to the level of town or village) and a site (down to the level of street, building or burial ground, for example). The division between "place" and "site" is somewhat arbitrary, and in the most recent version of GEDCOM, seems to have been abolished entirely in favour of a more structured form of the "place" specifier. It is intended to change the way in which !Family saves these fields to fit in with the newer usage, whilst still retaining the ability to read the old forms. Below the "Date" field is a choice of radio buttons to choose the calendar in which the date is defined. The default is "Gregorian", and at present the only other form allowed is "Julian", which is appropriate for dates in the English-speaking world prior to 1752. GEDCOM also defines "French R", "Hebrew", "Roman" and "Unknown", and these will be added to !Family's repertoire at some stage. Currently these present a problem if the option to present dates in ISO-8601 format has been chosen.
The "Death" and "Burial" tabs each have one additional field. Death can have a "Cause", typically that recorded on a death certificate for modern deaths. "Burial" can be specified down to the level of "Plot". Again, in versions 5.4 and 5.5 of GEDCOM, this detail has been subsumed into the "Place" tag, but !Family will continue to be able to read the "SITE", "CEME" and "PLOT" tags as specified in GEDCOM 5.3.
A last field within the tab is labelled "Sources" and currently shows the cross-reference id used in any SOUR tag for the event. This is the first stage of adding the ability to handle source citations to !Family.
Finally there are three buttons "Help" (which should bring you to this help page), "Cancel" and "OK". "Cancel" throws away any changes you have made and closes the dbox (clicking on its "close" icon will do likewise). If the dbox was opened from "Child" or "New..." menu items to create a new person in the database, then that person is not created. If the dbox was opened from "Edit", then the person continues to exist unchanged in the database.
Clicking "OK" saves the changes, creating a new person in the database if necessary. Note that if you have changed the names of one or both parents, the person may also be moved about the structure, and potentially, new database entries may be created for those parents. This feature is useful when entering a database following research further back into the past. Editing a person to add parents' names creates those parents, who in turn may be edited to add their parents, and so on, as far back as your research goes. On the other hand, don't try to change the name of a parent this way - if a parent's name is not in the database, then that person is created. Changing the Father's name for one child of a family in this dbox, for example, will create a new father, a new marriage and move this child into a new family, leaving the others with the same parents as before. Probably not what you intended. Changing someone's name needs to be done in the Edit Person dbox for that person.
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