How are you recording military service?

[Michael Friedman]

Happy Veteran’s Day and thank you to all who served!

How are you recording events like enlistment and release dates and places along with branch of service and perhaps places served, theaters of service, rank achieved and medals earned? I did a quick search for GEDCOM tags, it doesn’t look like there are any that would correspond to these. Are you just creating custom fields and if so are you doing it in events or facts?

[theKiwi]

Create events for them and if needed for GEDCOM export purposes give them a custom tag, or you can use the MILI tag for military.

Roger

[Michael Friedman]

Create events for them and if needed for GEDCOM export purposes give them a custom tag, or you can use the MILI tag for military.

Roger

An event always includes a date, place and memo which works for enlistment and release information but if you want to include branch of service, rank and medals those really aren’t events - they are facts albeit tied to the events and lend themselves to drop-downs or checkbox / pick lists which I’m not sure how to create in Reunion. Even better would be the ability to create dependencies like if a person chose “Navy” as branch of service then ranks like “Seaman” would appear whereas for Army it would not and only Navy-specific medals would appear. Theater of service or counties stationed would be place fields I guess.

Can anyone provide a screenshot of how they’ve set up their Reunion instance to document military service?

[theKiwi]

An event always includes a date, place and memo which works for enlistment and release information but if you want to include branch of service, rank and medals those really aren’t events - they are facts albeit tied to the events

They are all things that happened at a time and place - rank is achieved at a particular time, and strictly given at a particular place - same with medals.

A branch of service can be an event that has a start and end date, so can use a date like

bet 24 nov 2020 and 30 nov 2024

for example.

You don't have to fill in all the boxes of an event...

Roger

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

Here is what I did for my father. (Sorry, I tried several different files but can't seem to get it any clearer than this)


image.png

[comefromaway]

They are all things that happened at a time and place - rank is achieved at a particular time, and strictly given at a particular place - same with medals.

A branch of service can be an event that has a start and end date, so can use a date like

bet 24 nov 2020 and 30 nov 2024

for example.

You don't have to fill in all the boxes of an event...

Roger

Can't say I fully agree. Promotion (or demotion) is an event, as is receiving decorations. Where they happened is not going to be that relevant overall, really (unless it was in the field for example, or after a significant campaign.)