* [WishList Ref 550] Historical Event Timeline

[stewartrb]

Family Historian currently employs "Show Timeline Facts" which otherwise only displays facts from the gedcom about other related people on, and around, the individuals own timeline.

What I'd love to see is another timeline option drawing it's input not from the gedcom file, but an external file. (Another subdirectory in the database folder.)

I'm imagining something very similar to what TMGW had.

The Timeline Charts plugin would in no way address this. I want it internal to the program.

For example, I want to list the coronations of England's Kings and Queens in one database. A list of colonial wars in the New World.

These events would display on the Facts tab for the individual and help fix their place in history.

[tatewise]

Stewart, would a Fact Query Result Set giving those timeline facts be a suitable alternative?

I have modified the Standard Query Individual Timeline to include historical facts that happen around the lifetime of the chosen Individual.

To make this work requires one (or more) special Individual records that hold the historical facts. e.g. I have created a record whose Name is /Historical Facts/ that holds all the desired historical facts, but you could have several, such as /Historical British Monarchs/ and /Historical Colonial Wars/. Each fact could be a standard fact, but probably a custom Attribute such as Historical Fact would be better.

The changes I made to the Individual Timeline query are:

Columns
Date is set to Sort: Ascending
Order has been deleted
Fact has Expression: set to
=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0,TimelineFactText(%FACT%,["Individual"]),%FACT%)
This displays a Timeline Fact of the chosen Individual or a historical fact.

Rows
After the existing Add unless...
Add if =FieldText(GetRecord(%FACT%),'INDI.NAME:SURNAME') begins with 'Historical '
That adds all the facts from the special historical facts records.
Exclude if =IsTrue(%FACT.DATE% < CalcDate(EstimatedBirthDate(["Individual"],EARLIEST,9),-1,0,0)) is true
Exclude if =IsTrue(%FACT.DATE% > CalcDate(EstimatedDeathDate(["Individual"],LATEST,9),1,0,0)) is true
These exclude facts that are dated 1 year earlier than earliest birth date or 1 year later than latest death date of chosen Individual, but change the -1 and 1 if a wider range is desired..

[stewartrb]

I'll try that out. Thank you.

[Wilfreda99]

I tried this but cannot get the historical facts on the same query result as the individual, only one or the other and the historical facts are always the complete list. Should you be able to select the named individual and historical facts in the selection box, if so, how? I think I have put the expressions in correctly.
Chris

[tatewise]

Chris, do your Historical Facts Individual records have a Surname that begins with Historical?
The timeline for any person will include all the facts from such Historical records that occur in their lifetime, so those facts must all have suitable Dates.

I have experimented a bit more and here are alternatives for Fact definition of Expression:

1) Original using just the default %FACT% for Historical Facts:

=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0,TimelineFactText(%FACT%,["Individual"]), %FACT%)

2) Variant using FactSentence(%FACT%) for Historical Facts which allows you to customise its Narrative Sentence to include Place, Address, Age, etc:

=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0,TimelineFactText(%FACT%,["Individual"]), FactSentence(%FACT%,))

3) Variant using TimelineFactText(%FACT%,GetRecord(%FACT%)) for Historical Facts which uses the Advanced > Override Template for Facts tab:

=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0,TimelineFactText(%FACT%,["Individual"]), TimelineFactText(%FACT%,GetRecord(%FACT%)))

Custom Queries for those three alternatives are attached, but all have same name so will overwrite each other.

A similar Expression for Age will include the Historical Fact Age value:

=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0,TimelineFactAge(%FACT%,["Individual"]), %FACT.AGE%)

[TimTreeby]

Yes this does seem to work, as have added 3 'Historical Facts' to test
Queen Victoria Dies (1901), Titanic Sinks (1912), Moon Landing (1969). For my GreatGrandMother Time Line I now get this.

Timeline1.PNG (27.18 KiB) Viewed 19000 times

Which is what I believe is what was wanted. So seems to be working fine. And for other people get either 0,1,2 or all 3 Facts depending on when they lived.

[Wilfreda99]

You were right, I worked so hard at making sure the formulae were correct that I didn't notice that the individual 'Historical Fact' actually had 'Historical' as surname -

I have looked at the 3 variations and I like option 3 best (which is first download).
If I were producing this in a report to family etc I think I would save it as .csv file so that I could identify rows containing words 'Historical Facts' and colour them pale grey or something. Ideally of course this would be within FH but I don't think this is possible?

I think it would be useful if the result set included the name of the individual for forgetful people like me.

Thanks for this, should add a new dimension.
Chris

[tatewise]

Chris, firstly notice that all the Historical facts have no Age column entry (unless that is you have altered the Expression for Age as I suggested).

Secondly, you could indent or mark with an asterisk or enclose in brackets those Historical facts, or any other text prefix &/or suffix.
e.g.
The last term in the Expression could be:
Text( "* (" . TimelineFactText(%FACT%,GetRecord(%FACT%)) . ")" )

BTW:
What is it about that option 3 (first download) that you like so much?
I thought it would be unpopular.

FYI:
The Individual record Surnames do not HAVE to begin with Historical but must match whatever is defined in the Rows tab second filter.

All we need is for Stewart to agree that his wish has been satisfied, then this request can be moved to the General Usage forum, and the Query added to the FHUG Downloads.

[Wilfreda99]

The reason I liked that one was that it included the words "Historical Fact" in the result, which was an easy phrase to select (well 'hist' actually) in the spreadsheet to determine which rows would be highlighted.

I hadn't tweaked the sentence in option 2 so it came out oddly, but now I have and it looks fine, as indeed does the original one. Perhaps we could have both, original for those who accept it as it comes and the second one for those who like to tweak the sentence.

It would be good though if they could be identified with asterisks as you suggested to make them stand out and negate the need for export to spreadsheet. Unfortunately I am having a brain dead day, must be all the rain (according to facebook it is the first day of summer today.......) and I cannot work out exactly where to put your expression with the asterisks.

Does the age expression relate to the individual when the historical fact occurred? If so it didn't seem to work, though I did only have a quick look, since the results come out in chronological order it's quite easy to work out the age, and its absence again makes the row stand out.

Thanks
Chris

[tatewise]

The full Expression for the FactSentence case with an asterix prefix is:

=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0, TimelineFactText(%FACT%,["Individual"]), Text( "* " . FactSentence(%FACT%,) ) )

The Age Expression that I proposed gives the Age entered in the Historical Fact but the following would give the Age of Individual at time of Historical Fact:

=TextIf(TimelineFactOrder(%FACT%,["Individual"])>0, TimelineFactAge(%FACT%,["Individual"]), AgeAt(["Individual"],%FACT.DATE%) )

There are many variations on this theme, so not sure which is best to put in FHUG Downloads. Maybe provide a couple of downloads, plus examples of alternative expressions.

Still waiting for a reply from Stewart.

[Wilfreda99]

Have added these to the basic expression and they work a treat, see the attached jpeg (hopefully). (The historical facts seem rather random as they relate to different branches of my family, in practise I would set up 4 or 5 different ones.

Thanks.
Chris

[tatewise]

I have created fhugdownloads:contents:query_timeline_with_historical_facts|> Query:Fact ~ Timeline with Historical Facts.

[stewartrb]

Me again.

The query is nice, and programming on a level I'm not experienced with. I appreciate you taking the effort to entertain the idea.

But it's still just snapshot info produced like a report separate from the individual and their editing window.

What I'm interested in is something along the lines of TMGW's historical timelines.

Like the Timeline Facts already provided on the Individual Facts tab, they would help identify events in a persons timeline that aren't theirs but within which they fall.

We have a man with ten children and little else. But if you have, and can see, the dates of birth of those children, and better, the place of birth, now it's a near-trivial exercise (pre-1940) to find the family in the censuses. So the interwoven timeline facts are very useful (and would be more so if they also indicated the place info).

If I had a Census Historical Timeline, it would reveal those "missing" events as well. And Colonial Wars (should I care to know which war my colonial ancestor died in). British Monarchs. U.S. Presidents. Etc.

I want to see the results of the query but live on the individual tab like the other timeline facts.

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Two options that I can think of.

First, more database/s running alongside, but obviously not part of, the Gedcom in FH feeding interwoven information to the display of the individuals facts and attributes.

Basically a TMGW like feature adapted into FH.

This is the cleaner option and keeps the extraneous data out of the gedcom.

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Or, and this is based on your idea of creating these databases as /Historical Facts/ individuals within the gedcom, how about we treat those individuals as immediate family?

Like we can automatically see *immediate* family BMD info as part of an individual's Timeline Facts, how about extend this feature to show facts from one more category of people? Expand the *immediate* family group to include anyone surnamed /Historical Facts/.

"Censuses /Historical Facts/" is the "individual" and I create events in "its" record for all the censuses I care about seeing reflected in individual's timelines.

And anyone surnamed /Historical Facts/ is 1) treated like immediate family, and 2) any fact/event of this /Historical Fact/ individual, not BMD (which they won't have), is treated like BMD for purposes of displaying as the individuals Timeline Facts.

This would keep the historical timeline data integral (and transferrable) with the gedcom (and probably not add too much "mass" to it).

As a feature improvement, be able to toggle which members of the /Historical Facts/ family you want to treat like *immediate* family and see and which you don't. (Allowing multiple "databases" you can toggle on and off.)

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Either option would require programming so I imagine it would be a Wishlist item.

Thanks again.

[capnkeith]

Forgive me for jumping in here, please start a new thread if it's more appropriate.

I have downloaded both of these Queries from the KB and followed the instructions without any modification. Created a couple of facts for /! Historical/ but I cannot get them to display in an Individuals Timeline that they would fit within. Either by running the query itself or looking in the individuals Property Box Facts Tab.

Is there something else, perhaps not covered in the KB article, that I should also have done?

[tatewise]

Keith, you need a space in the Surname after ! Historical such as /! Historical Facts/ or /! Historical Monarchs/.

Robert, I like you last idea of having special Individual Records nominated as immediate family whose entire set of Facts can be included in the Facts tab Timeline option. To combine that idea with your toggle on/off idea, I suggest that the Timeline preferences page has an option to select which such Individual Records are nominated as immediate family. Then the user can decide to give them any Individual Name they like, and decide which ones to include or exclude. Perhaps a better variant of that would be to nominate a Named List and then the user can add and remove any Individual Records they like.

Robert, the Query Result Set is not quite as separate as you suggest, because the Property Box can be open at the same time as the Query Window so you can see the Timeline context alongside, even when not on the Facts tab. Furthermore, by integrating the other Timeline Queries with the Historical Facts you can see the details of many relatives together with the Historical Facts. Remember also that in general Reports do NOT include Timeline facts, so only a Query can produce a printout of a Historical Timeline, unless you take a screenshot of the Facts tab..

EDIT:-
I have adopted the idea of using a Named List to nominate any Individual Records whose facts are to be included. See updated fhugdownloads:contents:query_timeline_with_historical_facts|> Query:Fact ~ Timeline with Historical Facts and the earlier Timeline Queries that have also been updated. Advantages of this approach are it's easy to choose which Individual Records to include, as you can have different choices in different Named Lists, and the Individual Records can be simply acquaintances, or historical people such as monarchs, or special records of historical events with names such as Colonial Wars /Historical Facts/.

[tatewise]

Wish List Ref 550 Historical Custom Timeline Facts has been created.