* Jury Service

[Trevor]

I've recently come across some paperwork that I thought was lost - a Court Summons for Jury Service.
I'm having trouble recording the event as I can't find a template or anything suitable in FH to use.
The information it holds is a persons name, their Juror's Number, where, when and at what court to appear and the date it was issued. Once it is recorded, I can search through local newspaper archives to look for a case that it might relate too.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[AdrianBruce]

Interesting... For the more unusual items, I tend to fall back on some broad brush Source Templates. No sense in creating specific templates if you're only going to have one of them. (Conversely, if you're going to have a couple of dozen, then you should create a template even if no-one else will!)

In this instance, I would suggest using the template for a Letter. (From Essentials collection, Template "Letter(s)"). The Author will be whoever issues the summons. The Description will be something like "Summons for Jury Service at placename", etc, etc. The rest should be relatively obvious. I would put the Juror Number in the "Text from Source", rather than the Description.

The odd thing about the Essentials template for Letter(s) is that it has a Field for Description ("Summons for Jury Service at placename" etc in our case) but doesn't use Description in the Record Title, Bibliography or Footnote(s) formats. I would therefore clone the Letter(s) template and add Description into some or all of the above.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Like Adrian, I wouldn't create a custom template for what is likely to be a one off.

I would use the Miscellaneous Unpublished Document/Artifact template from the Essentials collection, because that's exactly what you're dealing with.

Use Author and Descriptive Title for Issuing Authority, and "Summons of personname for Jury Service at placename"; Date would be the date of issue.; Repository would be "Privately held" or whatever convention you use for documents that aren't publicly available. Descriptive Title does appear on footnote et. so you wouldn't need to clone this template.

Juror's Number, where, when and at what court to appear would go in the Text from Source.

[AdrianBruce]

Yes, on reflection, I think Helen's suggestion is better, especially because the Descriptive Title is already there for you.

[Trevor]

After being pointed in the right direction and opening the correct Source Template, the logical sequence of adding data became apparent, and everything just dropped into place. I also ran a couple of reports and all the information entered in the template is contained in each report.

Thank you both for your time and effort in helping me resolve this dilemma.

Trevor