Military Service

[M Hancock]

I am new to Macs and Reunion and am having a hard time with using Reunion. I want to add military service as a fact but am not sure how to go about it. It would be real helpful to have a how to book on using all the resources of Reunion as the Help section with the program is not very helpful.

All help is very appreciated.

[kyuck]

...I want to add military service as a fact but am not sure how to go about it. It would be real helpful to have a how to book on using all the resources of Reunion...
Welcome to Mac and Reunion. If you open Reunion, go to Manual, type in "fact" (without quotes), the first item in Results will show you how to create a new fact.
Hope this helps and welcome again,
Kevan

[TeriPettit]

Since military service typically has a date and/or location associated with it, it is often recorded as a series of events rather than as a fact, such as enlistment and mustered out dates. (Events are for data that has a date and/or location.)

You can add an Event type of your own by going to the Event Preferences screen, accessible either through Preferences../Fields.. and then picking the Events tab, or from the Add Event button on the Edit Person sheet. This preference sheet lets you choose how the event is formatted in reports, and what tag it gets exported under to GEDCOM.

Similarly, you can add custom Facts from the Facts tab that is also under Preferences../Fields.. or from the Add Fact button on the Edit Person sheet.

Reunion's Help is pretty good, in my opinion. But it is going to tell you how to add custom Events, or how to add custom Facts, or how to specify which Events and Facts are included in a report or chart, etc. It is not going to tell you how to record military service, or how to enter education, or how to document residence, etc., because that is a matter of personal taste, not a matter of how to use the software.

Facts are typically used for attribute/value pairs that do not have an associated date or place, such as Social Security number, eye color, height, etc., or for where the date or location is so fuzzy as to not be worth recording, such as occupation, or where the attribute/value pair is useful to pull out for statistical purposes even though it is closely associated with an event. Cause of Death is a good example of the latter; it could be entered as a detail of the Death event, and many people do it that way. But pulling it out as a separate fact makes it easier to generate lists where you sort or count people by their cause of death.

There are no hard and fast rules; some people, for example, prefer entering education as a fact, listing only the degree and the granting institution, while others prefer entering the date and place each degree was granted as an event.

Structured data is important for anything that you want to be able to search on and generate lists from, but you have to record it very systematically, or the statistics don't mean much. Unstructured data tends to read more smoothly in textual reports. Since I like reports that read like narratives rather than like databases, and I do very little statistical analysis, I generally enter almost everything just as Notes, and do not impose much structure on the data.

Reunion can accommodate pretty much any style of working with your data.

[Terry Medlar]

Teri's answer is excellent. The only thing I would add is that I have created flags for each conflict. The beauty of Reunion is its flexibility.