Occupation Event Details - Attributes vs Description

It’s not mentioned on the wiki page, what is the common workflow for adding occupation details such as position, department, employer? Attributes look like a good way, is there any reason to use the Description field instead?

Welcome

Unless there is a location specific reason, I will always add the Occupation as a person attribute. I will also add an attribute for Occupation on a census event. If I have these census events with occupation, I will forego the personal attribute which I use must often for my colonial relatives., i.e. “Blacksmith”

There are some graph reports that pickup on an Occupation event’s description field. In some cultures, a person’s occupation was an important identifier.

Since these would be internal attributes to the Occupation, I would put these on an Occupation event

Event type = “Occupation”
Date = “from <date1> to <date2>
Place = “Company, City, State, etc”
with attributes for department, etc.

I would use the Description field for a major position within the company, “President”, or if it was a university something like “English Professor”…

One way to figure out what will work best for you is to do it various ways and then see how they are displayed in your favorite reports.

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Do you also do this for people who have had several occupations over time?
I guess in past, people didn’t change jobs as often as we do today.

Adding the company as a place is interesting idea

Strangely, there’s no option to filter by event attributes making

True. pre 1850 records would in passing mention an occupation in colonial and early American records. I would not list “Farmer”. where almost all were engaged in some type of farming. But occupations like Blacksmith, shipwright, tanner, miller, etc were typically lifetime trades.

There is the place type “Building”

And there are users that will add Ships to the place database. There are place threads where how a user uses it for ships can be found here on Discourse.

In the Event custom filter, General filters, Events with the attribute <attribute>

Yes, sorry, I was looking in the People’s filter

There is the same type of attribute filter for people. And from the people filter rules you can select Persons with events matching the <event filter>

Perfect, thank you Dave :slight_smile:

If the company moves from one place to another in the same city, How do you manage this ?

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A real-life scenario:

The church I was baptized in built a new building. The old building was sold to another denomination. That record got an alternate name to account for that change. A new record was created for the new building. My sister was married in the new building. I used note records to create links between the old and new records.

For users not understanding why the new record… the new building needed its own (new) set of GPS coordinates.

Of course, our major challenge is knowing when this may have happened in the past or a change occurring in the future.

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