Custom Event Sentences

In his album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, Bob Newhart quoted a monkey which typed, “To be or not to be: that is the gazornenplat.”

Sometimes there are sentences that just don’t conform to the expected. For example, we can look at the expected form of the sentence created to describe the Cemetery User Event. This event uses one date, one place, and two descriptions. The first description holds the name of the cemetery, and the second holds the plot location. The main purpose of the Cemetery User Event is to identify the cemetery where the body is interred, so the first description field is not optional. All other fields are. Here is a possible set of sentence building codes for such an event:

If FindAGrave.com shows us that Joseph died on the 12th of November in West Jordan, Salt Lake, Utah, United States and was buried in the Redwood Memorial Cemetery, but we don’t know the actual date of the burial nor the plot within the cemetery, we could enter the following values in the Cemetery event fields, and let it produce the Sample Sentence shown.

The sentence is formed as we expected, but what happens if FindAGrave tells us that Joseph was cremated?

“…at the Cremated in West Jordan…” just isn’t how we want to say it.

Here is a solution to our problem, but first, let’s do some ground work. Cremation isn’t the only thing which could change the needs of our Cemetery event sentence. Joseph could have been buried in an unknown grave or lost at sea. As we encounter circumstances which dictate that we change the form of our sentence, we will want to keep a record of both the original sentence codes and the new custom codes we create to meet those circumstances. I created a folder which I named \EventSentences. I keep this folder inside the folder where I store all of my AQ Data. Understandably, I call this folder \AQ_Data. Inside the \EventSentences folder, I store a file for each User Event for which I need sentence codes beyond the standard codes for that event type. Within that file, I store the codes for each of the custom sentences I identify. I also store the standard codes for that event type, just in case I do something wrong and need a way to get back to the original. Here is what I placed into the C:\AQ_Data\EventSentences\Cemetery.txt file:

I can copy these sets of codes and paste them into the Cemetery User Event as needed. I can also create new codes as I identify the need to do so.

Now let’s go back and see how we actually use those custom codes. We will start by entering a second Cemetery event. That way the original Cemetery event remains untouched.

We edit Joseph’s Individual record, click the Add button for Other Events, and select the Cemetery event from the list.

I will use different date and place information to make it easy to remove this example when I am finished. When we click on the Use Custom Sentence checkbox, the Edit Sentence button becomes active. We will click on that button.

On the screen which appears we will edit the sentence code for this occurrence of the Cemetery event for this individual only. It will not alter the codes for the standard Cemetery event.

We will copy this code…

…and use it to replace the original code. We now can use the Cemetery event to show non-standard burials.

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