How to handle people who are a witness to an events?

Help
1

Hello,
I’m just curious, how are you handling people who are witnesses to an event (i.e. marriage, christening)?

Are you creating them in the “people section” or just adding them to the specific event,

Person - Event (ie. marriage) - Attribute Add(+) - Attribute-Type : Witness ?

I imagine depending on the selected approach it has different impact on the system (reports).

I appreciate any suggestion.
TIA

Gramps v. 6.0.7 (flatpak) on Linux Mint

2

Have you looked at how the Forms Add on deals with this to give an example
Generally you have to create a person to attach as a witness this gives
rise to a lot of detached people. I tend to to Create an Attribute and
store them as text. I also added a Notes column on the Forms Census to
allow noting lodgers, boarders and other waif’s and strays who have no
family links
phil

3

My events are always described in a Note attached to the Event record. Consider this is summary, equivalent to a copy of the original evidence (I don’t store screenshots of parish records because of the disk size required).

Witnesses are mentioned in this summary.

If witnesses are persons already in my tree (and are thus relatives of the main participant(s)), I drag’n’drop the Event record over these persons and set the role as witness, informant, …

As @comeng says, I could also systematically create a Person record for all witnesses but this would end up in many “detached” persons. Presently, there is no tool to enumerate the non-connected components in the graph (sometimes called “islands”). This makes difficult to identify these “isolated” individuals or groups.

4

Shared Event, add the people with a role/custom role of Witness…

5

Associating witnesses with an event is readily accomplished through the use of the Forms addon as noted by @comeng. I don’t think that creating (possible) unlinked person records is a draw back because there may not be any a priori evidence of a relationship. That’s the nature of research. It will be easier to search through person records for a named individual than notes attached to events.
As for reporting individuals sharing specific events, that appears to be limited as standard reports tend to focus on individuals with a primary role in any event. The only support I’ve found is a modified version of the DynamicWeb report (DynamicWebB), which is not part of the standard GRAMPS release.