Family Book Creator - Fact Descriptions

As previously mentioned in my prior post, I have been working on a family book for my sister-in-law and using Family Book Creator (FBC) for generating this book.

One doesn’t realize the results of one choice until one generates a book. For example, let’s talk about Fact Descriptions.

I sometimes use the description field for major fact types of Birth, Marriage, Death, and Burial Facts. For birth fact descriptions, besides stating a hospital, I might use, Twin or Triple to denote this person is a twin or triple and thus is why I have siblings born on the same day. I have used adopted if the person was adopted.

For Marriage descriptions, I do like to put in the Church name, if known, however I have been known to put in 1st marriage, 2nd marriage and so on. 

For Death descriptions, besides the name of the long care facility or hospital, I have put in cause of death, such as car accident, shooting accident, murdered, etc.…

For burial description, I usually put in the cemetery name, however, I have inputted, cremated or body donated to science.

Therefore, you can see, I don’t necessarily have the same type of information in the description field for each fact. FBC does offer, many description style options. Plus, each fact can be customized in FBC to have its own description style. The default style is “at description in place| Sentence. Description.” The results of this option: If the description contains more than two words and the last character is a punctuation mark (“.”, “!”, or “?”) the description will be shown as an additional sentence. Otherwise, the description will be shown as a location detail before a given place. If no place is given the description will be handled as an additional sentence. 

I also noticed that the description doesn’t always print in each spot where the fact is printed. 

My first example is the use of Twin. I have 28 individuals who are labeled as a twin. I have a set of twins, Jerrold and Jerome who are both married and have children. Thus, when they print in their parent’s family section, the description is not printing. However, when they print in their family section, the description does use the word “at” before twin.

Thus, I decided to move Twin to the suffix field of the name and place it inside parentheses. Now it prints wherever his name prints. Therefore, before his children are listed in his family section, in his children’s Family Sections where he is listed as the parent, also in the index. 

Now what if I have a complete sentence in the description the result stated it should print as a separate sentence after the fact. I have an individual who died in a plane crash and once I changed the description verbiage to a sentence with a period at the end, it printed perfectly.

 My main take away from this, is be conscious on what you are typing in your description fields.  The more we can have the data the way we want in the Family Tree Maker file, the less we must manually modify in the generated Word document. 

If you want to see what you have in your description fields for a fact, I ran a quick filter. I “filter in” everyone who had a “death” “description” that “is not blank.” I had 128 individuals. I clicked on the first individual and looked at their description. I said the sentence out loud, He or She died at “description” in Location on date. If it made sense, I left it. If it didn’t make sense, I turned the description into a sentence. This didn’t take me very long at all. Run this for your Birth, Marriage, and Burial facts. 

Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!