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This is a complex issue, so in this topic I am discussing just one part of the issue, the part where the display text describes an individuals multiple marriages. At present the English text displays like this:

He married 3 times. The 1st time he married Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe and Freda Smith, on 25 May 1977 in Some Town, USA. ………………. The 2nd time he married Bess Brown, daughter of Jack Brown and Alice Watson, on 14 February 2001 in Some other Town, Canada ……………. The 3rd time he married Joan Jones , daughter of Alan Jones and Helen White, on 31 December 2011 in That place, Australia

This follows a change made a couple of releases ago to use digits “ordinal abbreviations” like “3 times” and “1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. to make it practical to have a large number of marriages (greater than 10!)

However, this does not work well in some languages, especially (like German) where ordinals are not used.

I’ve been asked if we could change it to something like this:

He married three times. The first time he married Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe and Freda Smith, on 25 May 1977 in Some Town, USA. ………………. The second time he married Bess Brown, daughter of Jack Brown and Alice Watson, on 14 February 2001 in Some other Town, Canada ……………. The third time he married Joan Jones , daughter of Alan Jones and Helen White, on 31 December 2011 in That place, Australia

The answer is yes, it CAN, but SHOULD it? And if so should there actually be a mixture of ordinals for larger numbers (11th, 12th, 13th etc, ) and for counts (4 times, or four times) but full text for smaller numbers and if so where should the change happen.

For example, I might suggest that in English it would be normal to mix counts like this:

once, twice, three times, 4 times, 5 times……..

and Ordinals like this:

first, second, third, fourth, 5th, 6th, 7th,…..

NOTE: all of these counts and ordinals are translatable texts, so the answer does not have to be the same for every language. My question is really what should the [English] starting point be. Others can then make their own choice for their own language translation.

Finally, all of the above requires that the list of numbers must be limited. The original change came about because there were only 5 allowed for. As soon as someone found a person with more than 5 marriages (King Henry VIII perhaps?) the code failed. So do we extend 5 to 10, or 15, or what?
The advantage of the current purely digital display is that it is not limited at all. Its just a loop through as many digits as required with a couple (three) alternate suffixes added.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

I confess, never seen this view before but your thread made me turn it on and I set it for Henry VIII. It’s one large paragraph block so in fact, I find the 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc to his 6th wife easier to find.

Just tried translate in Google “1st” to German and saw “1”, not proper when saying The 6 time he married. But, at the end of my Henry story, “Henry TUDOR and Anne LA MARCK had none children” doesn’t sound any better.

I vote for English 1st using number and ordinal to whatever. After all, when I translate French, Spanish, German and other Wikipedia articles into English they don’t always translate to proper English (Google). But by reading the paragraph, I get the sense of what the fact is I’m looking for.

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macalter wrote:

Just tried translate in Google “1st” to German and saw “1”, not proper when saying The 6 time he married.

As I mentioned, don’t worry about translations, just what you would use in English. I already know (from German users) that they need to use text like “erste” and never “1st”, or “1”. But once we have the English base code it can be translated much more easily than at present.

macalter wrote:

I vote for English 1st using number and ordinal to whatever.

Thanks. I am surprised, but would your view be different of each marriage started a new sub-paragraph, making it easier to see?

macalter wrote:

But, at the end of my Henry story, “Henry TUDOR and Anne LA MARCK had none children” doesn’t sound any better.

You are right (though I did ask that we don’t extend this discussion outside the ‘number of marriages’ issue here. There are too many issues to try and discuss them all in one thread.) However, as you have mentioned it (and it is certainly not right) I have amended the code to use “no” instead of “none” in the sentence “Henry TUDOR and Anne LA MARCK had no children”

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

(sorry, wasn’t intending to shift gears)

Paragraph separation for each marriage would help but I still like 1st, 2nd still. (I tend to do double space between paragraphs.) Think consistency is important —
1st to 100th over
first to tenth and 11th to 100th is proper (I think my school English rules are right) but in reading the story, not as preferable to me.

The 1st time he married Catherine TRASTÁMARA, daughter of Ferdinand TRASTÁMARA and Isabella TRASTÁMARA, on 11 June 1509 in Greenwich blah, blah

The 2nd time he married Anne BOLEYN, daughter of Thomas BOLEYN and Elizabeth HOWARD blah, blah

The 3rd time he married Jane SEYMOUR, daughter of John SEYMOUR and Margery blah, blah

I can then see the list of respective children of each marriage and find the paragraph that refers to who the other parent was. Again given that in most circumstances there won’t be six wives to sift through:)

No wait, Elizabeth Taylor tops him at 8 but doubt you have a user doing her genealogy 🙂

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macalter wrote:

Paragraph separation for each marriage would help but I still like 1st, 2nd still.

OK. I’m looking forward to seeing what others think.

Is your “English” US, GB, or AU? I assume US. Only they don’t all have to be the same either.

The other question in my long rambling first post was “How many marriages to allow for?” To cater for languages like German where 1st, 2nd etc is not wanted, we are forced to create a finite list. So a maximum is needed, of say 5 (obviously too low), 10, 15 or something.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

I changed to British English when I tried the custom contact block for whatever reason that worked so left it.

Cut off? I guess, while I don’t want to meet someone married 10 times, 10 is safe bet. Five would be too low, I’d be missing one of Henry’s wives. And you couldn’t read about Liz.

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I’m finally catching up! Until prompted by this forum topic, I had not attempted to enable, set up, or explore the use of this module. I have now spent a little time on it and must first say what a vast improvement it is upon the ‘robot-language’ created by FH packages in the past in building Descendants Reports and the like. But, as you imply, Nigel, there is still a little room for improvement, provided you are prepared to spend time and energy on it. In answering your specific questions here I must first declare that amongst my database of over 14,000 individuals, only ONE married four times, three three times and the remainder twice or less. So, dealing first with

As soon as someone found a person with more than 5 marriages (King Henry VIII perhaps?) the code failed. So do we extend 5 to 10, or 15, or what?

from a personal point of view I am happy with a max of 5, although I would hope that the code could produce an error message and move on rather than simply fail if this max was exceeded. Catering for Henry Vlll is very laudable but I would sooner have the generated wording improve for the more ‘normal’ number of marriages (eg. At present I am told that an ancester married ‘2 times’ and I should prefer to see ‘twice’). If the aim is to generate ‘good’ English text, which reads well and presents well as a narrative, there is no doubt in my mind that it is preferable to avoid numerals as far as possible, and that ‘twice’ and ‘the second time’ are a great improvement on ‘2 times’ and ‘2nd’. As I have indicated, from a purely selfish point of view, I should be happy if this approach was adopted until the fourth marriage, and threafter I would have no problem with the use of ordinals.

Let me also mention another problem which I have detected in the interpretation of the number of ‘marriages’ in generating the narrative we are discussing. Now that common law marriages are catered for , we can correctly show this status for individuals and couples but I would also like to see it reflected in the Fancy Tree View. I have numerous cases of a man re-commencing his life with his deceased wife’s sister after the death of his wife. They went on to have children together and it was in most respects a ‘marriage’ but the ceremony could not be conducted in England and Wales before 1907 because it was deemed to be illegal. Thus it was, and can now be shown as a common-law marriage. For such an individual, the Fancy Tree View generated narrative says Joe Smith married 2 times … and goes on to spell out the details of the two. Is it possible to check for ‘common-law marriage’ and handle it differently?. For example, as the partner in a common law marriage is referred to as a common-law wife, perhaps the text could say something like ‘Joe Smith had two wives, the first, xxxxxxx, he married in mm yyyy,….; the second, a common-law wife, was xxxx, whose common-law marriage commenced in mm yyyy’

I can imagine that may not be easy to achieve, and it also begs the question should other types of ‘marriage’ also be detected and handled differently – particularly ‘Registered Partnerships’ – and I think the answer to that should probably be yes. As you said at the outset Nigel, this is a complex area; probably, however much you tweak and change the existing code, there would always be ways in which it could be further improved, but as I said at the start, I think, even as it stands it is a a vast improvement on the past. (NOTE: These paragraphs moved to new topic)

I have spotted another concern in Fancy Tree View which is outside the scope of this topic so I shall raise it as a separate topic.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14