Events: Dates & Places

What Is an Event?
Entering or Editing Events for People
Default Events
Memos
Adding a New Event to a Person's Record

Removing Events from a Person
Sorting Events for a Person

Sorting Events for Everybody
Cutting, Copying, and Pasting Events
Saving and Seeing Events

Changing One Event Into Another
More Space for Places and Memos
Substitute Events


Dates

Places

Events List

What Is an Event?

Reunion lets you record the events in people's lives. An event is comprised of a date and place, and generally represents a significant occurrence in somebody's life.

Reunion also records family events — significant occurrences that involve two people (a couple) or perhaps a nuclear family. Learn more.

For more details on dates, click here.

For more details on places, click here.

Entering or Editing Events for People

To record an event or to edit an event you've already entered, click directly on any event in the family view, such as Birth or Death. This will open the Events section of the Edit Person panel, shown below.

Another way to get here is to choose Edit > Person > [person's name] from the menu and then click Events.

The Events section contains a scrolling list in which you record the significant events in people's lives. To enter and edit events, you can type directly into the fields in the list. Pressing the Tab key will move the cursor from field to field. Pressing Shift + Tab will move the cursor backward through the fields. Or, you can simply point and click the mouse to put the cursor into any field of any event.

Default Events

By default, the Birth and Death event will appear, waiting for your entries. You can make your own set of default events which will appear every time you add a new person to your family file. In fact, you'll save lots of time if you set up the correct set of default events early on in your research.

Memos

In addition to a date and place, each event has a Memo field. This field is for additional, minor details relating to the event. For example...

Event Example Memo
birth Time of birth 7:55 AM.
birth Born at the Southwick General Hospital.
birth 1841 Census says "Born in County"
birth Birth year calculated from age at death on headstone.
graduation GPA 3.6

Memo fields are limited to 2,500 characters. The memo field is not for longer text, such as stories, a transcribed obituary or will. Longer items should be entered in a note field or a source record (or perhaps scanned and saved as an image file linked to a person, family, or source record).

event memo

To open a larger window for editing an event memo, double-click the event in the list.

The Initial Caps button is explained here. (This button does not apply to memos.)

Adding a New Event to a Person's Record

To add an event that does not appear by default...

  1. Click the Add Event button in the Edit Person / Events panel.
  2. Select the event field in the list that appears.
  3. Click Add Event. (If you want the selected event to become a default event, check the button just under the list, shown below. If the selected event is already a default event, the button will change into a little label indicating as much.)

If you don't see the event you need, click the Event Settings button to define your own events.

Adding Multiple Events (or Facts) of the Same Type

As a shortcut for entering multiple events of the same type, or other events that you've recently added, Control-click (or right-click) an event in the Events section of the Edit Person panel.

If you enter multiple events of the same type (for example, if you have conflicting birth dates from different sources) all of the events will appear in reports, in the order they appear in the Edit Person panel. You can change this order by dragging events up and down in the Edit Person panel.

However, for display in the family view, and also for graphic charts, Reunion includes only the first instance of an event that appears multiple times. In the Edit Person panel, you can drag one of the events to the top (for example, drag the preferred birth event above all the other birth events for the person) and then Reunion will show that birth event in the family view and in charts.

If you have several cases of multiple events of the same type, you may want to create a family view that includes a "smart list." Doing so will let you see all facts and events including any multiple-defined events in the family view. For example, if you record a census event for a person each year, the smart list will provide a quick look at all the census events for a person. Learn more about smart lists and customizing family views here.

Removing Events from a Person

To remove an event, select the event and click the Remove Event button. (See the screen example above.)

As a shortcut, you can Control-click the event and choose Remove.

You can also remove every occurrence of an event in a family file.

Sorting Events for a Person

The easiest way to sort the events for one person is to visit the Edit Person window and click the Sort Events button. The button with three vertical bars just below the list of events.

This will chronologically sort the events for a person. Events that lack a "year" element will be sorted according to the settings in the Change > Sort > Events panel, which is described below.

In the Edit Person window, the order of a person's events can also be manually changed by dragging individual events up and down in the list.

Sorting Events for Everybody

To sort events chronologically for everybody, marked people, or the current couple...

  1. Click Change in the navbar.
  2. Click Sort.
  3. Click the Events tab.

This opens the Sort Events panel...

In the first section (Sort events for...), select the people whose events you'd like to sort: the current couple, marked people, or all people.

In the middle section, choose what will happen for people whose events contain anything that can't be sorted. (An event is considered "unsortable" if it has no year.) The choices are...

In the bottom section of the Sort Events panel, choose what happens when sorting is finished. Options are to mark no one, mark people whose events were sorted, or mark people who have events that could not be sorted.

What is the Event Template?

After Sorting...

After sorting, a message will appear just below the Sort button indicating...

Here is an example of the message that will appear after sorting events...

Cutting, Copying, and Pasting Events

When an entire event line is highlighted in the list (by clicking in the Type column in the Edit Person/Events), the Edit menu and/or standard Mac keyboard shortcuts are available to cut, copy, or paste events. You might find these shortcuts useful if you enter an event for the wrong person, or if you need to copy information (date, place, memo field) from one person to another. For example, when copying census data from a father to his children for each census year.

Step by Step...

  1. In Edit Person > Events, enter an event for a person, and a source citation if applicable.
  2. Highlight the whole line of the event you want to copy and choose Edit > Copy from the menu at the top.
  3. Click Done in the Edit Person panel.
  4. Navigate to the person to whom you want to add this event.
  5. Open his Edit Person > Events panel.
  6. Click on the line above where you want the new event to appear.
  7. Choose Edit > Paste.

Make sure when you click on events you do it on the event name at the left to select the entire line, both for the copying and pasting.

X Cut
C Copy
V Paste
copypaste Z Undo

Note: If an event has citations, those citations will be copied and pasted too — unless you are copying and pasting between different family files. Citations will not copy and paste between family files because source records will be different between family files.

Saving and Seeing Events

When you are finished entering or editing events, exit the Edit Person panel by clicking Done, pressing the Return or Enter key, or choosing an item in the navbar or sidebar. Reunion will save your changes.

The events you've added or changed will appear in the family view if the current family view includes those particular events. If not, then you need to change the family view or customize the family view by, for example, adding the missing field to a person's button.

Changing One Event Into Another

There may be instances, particularly after importing a GEDCOM file, where you need to perform a little "clean up" of events for some of the imported records. Reunion has a dedicated Move Field feature to move every instance of a field into another field (learn more); however, it's also easy to simply change one event for one person into another event for the same person. For example, changing somebody's "Residence" event into a "Census" event. To do this on a case-by-case basis...

change event
  1. Find the desired person and select Edit Person > Events.
  2. Control-click on the event you'd like to change and select Change Event.
  3. A list of events will appear. Select the desired event.
  4. Click the Change Event button.

Again, this does not alter every instance of the event in your family file; it only affects one event for one person.

More Space for Places and Memos

To open a larger window for editing an event, double-click any event in the list in the Edit Person/Events panel. The Edit Event window, shown below, will appear. This window is primarily useful for typing longer memos (up to 2,500 characters) and places, and also for entering/editing LDS event information.

Substitute Events

When dates are included in the Name Setup layout setting of a chart, such as an ancestor or descendant chart, Reunion allows the substitution of a different field in place of the birth or death date if these fields are missing. For example, if a chart includes dates, and a few people in the chart don't have birth dates, but they do have christen dates, the Substitute Events feature would permit the automatic substitution of the christen date where the birth date was missing. Similarly, burial dates could optionally be substituted for people who have no death date entry, but do have a burial date entry.

To select substitute events for birth and death, choose Reunion > Settings and click the Fields button. Then select either Birth or Death in the list of events, and use the menu button that appears at the bottom of the middle section. If you don't want Reunion to substitute events, choose None from each menu.

Whenever a field is substituted, the abbreviation specified in the Field Settings window will prefix the data.