Have you moved Education and Occupation from Facts to Events?

[Michael Friedman]

I'm curious how many of you have moved either one or both of these fields and also broken them up into constituent parts?

Some relatives have lots of degrees and lots of jobs and among other things I'm running into 255 character limits trying to shove all that information into each respective field. It seems reasonable to move both of them to Events and then have the following field:

For Each "Occupation" (you could add as many as needed):
- Employer Name
- Employer Location
- Position Held
- Dates employed

It also seems like there should be a place to note whether this person is retired or perhaps retired from a specific employer.

For Each "Education" (you could add as many as needed):
- School Name
- School Location
- Highest Level / Degree Attained
- Dates Attended (To / From)
- Graduated (Yes / No)
- Note (for things like GPA, Fraternity / Sorority memberships, Sports played, etc)

Has anyone done this or something similar? Thoughts? How difficult would this be to do?

[ADHoeschen]

Michael, I have moved occupation from Facts to Events because in more recent times I find that people have had a number of jobs/careers. I usually just use a phrase such as "office clerk at XYZ insurance company," or something similar. I hadn't thought about expanding the information with different fields, but it makes perfect sense to me. In this day and age we see people getting multiple degrees and having various jobs. It isn't like life in the 1800's and early 1900's when you were born a farmer, worked on your father's farm & died a farmer.

[Ann P]

This is something I would also like to do. However I am not an experienced \reunion user. How do you move a field from being a Fact to instead being an Event?

[Kell75]

I love your thought of adding additional fields for occupation and education. I did move Occupation and Education to events in my file, for just the reason you stated, I wanted to know when they worked where. I also wanted to know the date ranges for the education locations. I just enter the date range, location and in Memo add the school name or employer name and other details. If I have a lot of details I'll create a note field for the person. It would be nice if we could have a way to customize each line for more than just a date, location and memo. So far, my system has worked for me though.

I did add some new fields to my events though for military "military enlistment" "military discharge" "military arrival" "military departure" and "muster date". Again for these same fields, if I need more than the date, location and a brief memo field, I'll just create a military note.

[Ryan_N]

Michael Friedman I have Education, Occupation, Military, Public Office and maybe some others as Events and Facts--each assigned to their usual/standard GEDCOM tag in both tabs.

The logic with both, are the unique instances where the item is best logged either (a) without place/date or (b) with a litany of dates (i.e., in the case of Occupation or Public Office). In the "litany of dates" scenario, a public tree i.e. on Ancestry or whatever gets terribly cluttered if someone held multiple public offices, board appointments, job titles, occupation types, etc--to the point of ridiculousness. To reduce clutter, placing certain things as Facts (vs. Events) with a listing of comma-separated dates (i.e. Mayor, YYYY, YYYY, YYYY, YYYY, YYYY) is a lot more clean than listing each one of these, separately, as an Event. But these scenarios are indeed really rare. 99% of the time, I just log as Events so I can take advantage of date and place--and sometimes date and/or place for one of these types of facts offer the researcher something of significant value in telling the story of an individual.