Jeanne Allan's Obituary tag sentences

 

When I started the TMG page for sentence construction, it was so that users could share their ideas on how to make tag sentences.  Never did I realize there would be so many different ways!  Keep them coming.

Jeanne wrote me:  I do a variation on the obituaries.  I also use the detail field as the name of the news paper.  The date is the date of the obituary.  But I make the persons listed in the obituaries witnesses. There are three things of particular importance to me that I want to appear on the witnesses' reports, the name (especially married daughters), relationship to the deceased and where the witness was living at the time. The memo field is divided into nine sections. I use the first 8 for locations of people mentioned in the obituary and the ninth for a transcription of the obituary should I choose to put one there.

If it does not already exist, I create a name variation for the witness that matches that of the name of the obituary.

I have one witness tag called MemoLayout on the obituary tag:

--Location1||--Location2||--Location3||--Location4||--Location5||--Locat

--Location1||--Location2||--Location3||--Location4||--Location5||ion6

||--Location7||--Location8||-- Text of Obit If Desired

(The --'s are to prevent any unwanted information from accidentally

printing)

When I start entering the information I copy the tag to the memo field so I can make sure I put the data in the correct place.

I then have witness roles for the various types of survivors. The number on the end corresponds to the location of that witness. ie SurSibNone, SurChildNone, SurSpouseNone SurSib1, SurChild1, SurGChild1, SurSpouse1, etc SurSib2, SurChild2, SurGChild2, etc SurSib3, SurChild3, SurGChild3, etc etc If no location is listed for a survivor or the information is redundant I use the appropriate role that ends "None". This allows for witnesses to live in up to eight different locations (9 counting the "none"). So far I haven't used more than four, and I've identified up to fifteen different survivors.

A sentence for a surviving daughter who lives in location "2" might be: <On [D]> [R:SurChild2] <of [m2]> was identified as a surviving daughter in the obituary of [P1] <printed in [L]>.

If there was no location for the child the sentence would be <On [D]> [R:SurChildNone] was identified as a surviving daughter in the obituary of [P1] <printed in [L]>.

or

If the daughter was Mrs. Thomas Day of St. Louis, Missouri, "St. Louis, Missouri" would replace "--Location2" in the memo.

The witness's role would be SurChild2:

On 23 Jan 1910 Mrs. Thomas Day of St. Louis, Missouri was indentified as a surviving daughter in the obituary of Charles Graham printed in "The Daily Register", San Diego, California.

If the witness role selected was SurChildNone:

On 23 Jan 1910 Mrs. Thomas Day was indentified as a surviving daughter in the obituary of Charles Graham printed in "The Daily Register", San Diego, California.

This does not provide a way to handle any other misc. information about the survivor that might be in the obituary, but I'm looking at variations on Myrnice's census tags that might eliminate that problem. {So far there has not been any}