Kith and Kin Pro manual - Tutorial - Adding extra fields to people and families

As well as storing data in the standard person and family fields (eg. Surname, Marriage date, etc) you can add your own "user-defined" fields to the database. GEDCOM supports some additional fields which you may want to add to your database, although you can give them your own name. The name you use for the field is used as the description in printouts. The sample family tree contains two extra fields, "Occupation" and "Cause of death". Person [P423]'s "Occupation" field contains the entry "Coal weigher". This would appear in a Details report as "Occupation: Coal weigher".

You don't have to use one of the standard GEDCOM fields as a user-defined field; you can add any field you want and if it doesn't have an equivalent GEDCOM tag then it won't be included in GEDCOM transfers.

Let's say we want to record a graduation date and place for people in the family tree. We need to add two new fields to the "People" table of the database. We'll call one "Date of graduation" and the other "Graduation place".

Use "Options" in the main menu, then "User fields" and then "Person". This opens a data form titled "User defined Person fields" and you will see that in the "User fields" list there is already an "Occupation" field. Click on the "Field name" box and type in "Date of graduation". Now click on the down arrow to the right of the "Field type" box to bring down the list of available field types.

There are several different field types which you can use for a user-defined field:

String - Text
Small integer - Small whole numbers
Integer - Large whole numbers
Logical - True or false
Decimal - Decimal numbers
Currency - Money
Date - Date

For a more comprehensive description of the field types, see: Adding and maintaining user-defined fields.

We want to make "Date of graduation" a date field so select "Date" from the "Field type" list. We want this new field to be included in GEDCOM transfers and there happens to be a suitable tag for it so scroll through the entries in the "GEDCOM tag" list until you reach "GRAD = Graduation". Click on the small "+" to the left of "GRAD" to display the tags available within GRAD. We want the date so click on "DATE = Date" and the tags "INDI GRAD DATE" will appear in the box above the GEDCOM tag list (INDI is just the GEDCOM tag for individual, ie. person, and it is displayed here so that you can tell it is not a family tag, which would start with FAM).

The remaining option for a user-defined field is "Privacy level". This can be used to exclude certain fields from report, Web pages, etc, later on. For example, you might have added extra fields which only store data related to your research; giving them a privacy level of 1 will exclude them from reports where you choose only to print fields at level 0. For our graduation date field we want that to appear everywhere so we will leave the Privacy level at 0 (blank).

That's all the information we need to create this new field. Click on the "Add" button to add the new field to the database. When Kith and Kin Pro has finished you will see the new field in the "User fields" box.

If you now click on "Date of graduation" in the "User fields" box the other boxes on the form will show the current settings for the field.

Add the "Graduation place" field in the same way. Change "Field name" to "Graduation place", "Field type" to "String" and "GEDCOM tag" to GRAD | PLAC. You will notice that the "Add" button has not been enabled yet. This is because there is one more setting we need to make for a string type field and that is the "String size". Type "60" into the "String size" box and click on the "Add" button to add the field to the database.

Click on the "Close" button to close the user-defined fields form. Now click on the "Edit person" button on the button bar and select any person from the list. You can see that the new fields have been added to the list above the "Notes" section of the person data form.

Notice that there is only one source button for all the user-defined fields. To add a source reference for a user-defined field you must first make sure that you have selected the correct field in the list. Placing the mouse cursor over the sources button will tell you which user-defined field is currently selected.

Next tutorial - Starting your own family tree

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