Hmm. Must have been dozing at the wheel and overlooked the announcement. Will give it a whirl when I get the chance.
Ed. Just tried, but not clear how to install. Tried renaming the top folder, but to no avail. Some handholding needed 
The instructions for manual download of a GitHub repository ZIP archive and install are below the 3rd party add-on list on the wiki.
Note that @RenTheRoot has set these plug-in registrations for Gramps 6.0 only compatibility.
And it assumes that you are familiar with setting up form use in the original Form system.
Don’t think there was an announcement as such. But sharing the repository on GitHub is a tacit invitation for testing and feedback.
Quick note that even though I set it as such, it actually is currently compatible with earlier versions as well (probably) but i haven’t tested it on them and that also may change when I merge in some of the form updates some other people had made between when I started making the program and now.
And if anyone wants to test out what I’ve got so far here is the critical information! Please DO NOT USE THIS ON YOUR MAIN FILE YET. It does modify events directly and I don’t want any corruption going on since this addon is still incomplete.
There is one main workflow that is currently fully available for testing! That is by using the standard custom form template interface I made. Custom event definitions are not yet accessible.
To try it out you will want to make a form template and save it like so. Any form should work, I just picked a random one here:
Then make a new form source with the template attached. To do this make your source and add a “Form” attribute with the parent form name just like you would any other time. But to access the template you will also want to add a “Template” attribute with the name of the template you made. It looks like this:
Then you can make a form for someone just like you would normally but select the custom form source you made.
Add a person or a few and fill in the form.
Then save it, go back to the person and you should see some new events created!
You can even edit the form and see the events change in the person view.
I’m still working on connecting the custom event template creator to the main program. That will allow you to really drill down in the event creation and grab details to build the event date, description, role, and place for each event.
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Thanks for the clarification.
The Template attribute was missing bit!
I’ll play some more….
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I’ve got templates up and running and have made some feedback on GitHub. One relates to the events as shown above where there should be dates for the new events. Another observation is the ‘unknown’ in the Age column. Probably should be the calculated age value for reporting purposes. Though reading your last paragraph, perhaps I’m jumping the gun!
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I am very keen that Dates are plain text and no age calculation should
be performed for me Forms is used for transcribing birth marriage and
death info and especially census. It is important to transcribe what you
see and WRITE it down, spurious manipulation and calculation should if
it must be installed be capable of being turned off but I would rather
it is not there in the first place.
phil
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I completely concur with you re: the use of Forms. My observation was linked to the list of events that appears for an individual (and with hindsight not relevant to the forms update). The Age calculation seems to be a feature of the list creation and of course depends on an event date. The age entered into a census form is not displayed in this list.
For me, the Age column on a US Census form is one of the most time consuming to convert to a Gramps record. This is because Gramps does not have a direct input for an Age on date. It only outputs it
As an example, if there is no Birth event for a Person and the 1940 Census shows Relationship “Son” Age 12, born in Pennsylvania; then this means born 1928±1, Pennsylvania. And I create an Event:
- Type: Birth
- Desc: Son, Census age 12 on 5 Jun 1940
- Date: Calc between 1927 and 1929
- Place: Pennsylvania, USA
and attach the reference Citation
For me all ages quoted on Census and even other documents are highly
suspect. (Hearing error, Transcription error, outright lie)
If you have a name for an individual then you have to have a birth event
and I then follow your idea with ~ (circa) 1828 or 1927 >< 1929
I tend to use circa for preference simpler and quicker to input. Also
means the date is an educated guess
phil
the date quality term “Calculated” seems to imply the date is “highly suspect”.
I also use the description to indicate the basis of the calculation. Currently I use a text string in the Clipboard to accelerate the Description entry for a whole family. So all I need to change is the Age value and relationship. (But I also use “Dependent”, “Boarder”, or “employee” for the Role of household members and Primary only for the Head. Since you have to change from “Unknown” anyway.)
Awesome! Seeing this feedback I am considering adding a checkbox or something to automatically apply the census date to events created in a template so that users don’t have to go through the more complicated advanced event creation workflow. It will of course be possible to add a date to an event from the template using the more involved event template, but including a date may be something that more general users would want to be able to do without going through learning how to do that.
The age issue I think will have to stay within the purview of the more complex event template creation vs the standard form template interface. This will be clearer once everything is connected, but the event template allows for operations like addition and subtraction to be performed on column values to create events. So there would be a number of different ways that “age” could be recorded based on a census. One way could be if a column for “age” was already there, you could just have the age in the description field with the date of the census. Now if you had a birth year instead of an age column, that could be recorded like so:
(ignore the incorrect error, something I’m still coding)
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I only enter family members into any census all others are recorded in a
note column under the details section if you include Servants Boarders,
Employees you end up with too many random none connected individuals
phil
I enter all residents on census night as I do not necessarily know a priori whether they are related or not. In the UK it was common to ‘farm out’ young children to act as servants to related families during the 20th century.
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Me too! That’s actually one of the main reasons I started making this addon update, I wanted to be able to automatically link census events to everyone with their roles in the event determined by the “relationship” column in the census.
Whilst I can understand doing this sort of thing if you are doing a study through the ages of residents of a town or village. I am not not convinced for family history purposes you necessarily want to add the names of all the inmates in a workhouse or military personnel in a barracks or even the names of people in a house of multiple occupancy.
That is why I would prefer to have a proper Notes functionDetails, Headings, Gallery Tabs increased by one to include Notes for the Event.
phil
One of my great-grand-uncles was a sailor in the Norwegian merchant fleet in the early 1920s. He disappeared sometime around 1924–25, and I’ve been trying to trace all his movements to find out what happened to him. One of the most effective methods I use is to track the movements of his shipmates as well—because Norwegian sailors often transferred to another vessel together, usually with one or two others.
I’ve managed to locate several of his “sign aboard” entries that way, especially when their names were misspelled. That’s also why I always record every name from a source—whether it’s a census record, a ship manifest, a church book entry, or anything else. I’ve found, more than once, that someone listed as a lodger or tenant in the same household—or in a room, apartment, or house on the property—turned out to be a close relative of my ancestors, and therefore a relative of mine.
More than once, when tracing someone back, I’ve ended up in a record I had already used as a source for someone else—without realizing that another person listed there was also one of my relatives.
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Note to testers: The most recent update I have pushed out breaks all previously created templates. All templates must be deleted and remade in the editor. I figured I wouldn’t include back compatibility since this is still very much development stage / hopefully no one used it on their main trees to test. I do suspect the new update probably introduced some new bugs which I will be trying to find shortly.
But with the new updates the user is able to select whether they want to include census date and place directly on the main template creator!
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Actually I just broke the templates again to add another option to directly add the citation to the event, but I think that’s the last one I will add.
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In the interest of getting this published as soon as possible, I reconsidered what features being included would make this a useful addition to the addon for the highest number of people. I came to the conclusion that with the new feature I added allowing date, place, and citation to be added automatically for events- the advanced event template creator would not necessarily be needed in the first version for the addon to be useful to people.
So I created a new branch called Version1 that removes these features. The goal now is to finalize the main template creator part of the addon and get it ready for production. There is one more major feature I plan to add (allowing role to be selected from a column in ‘Multisection’ type forms instead of it being defaulted to ‘Primary’) but aside from that version 1 is nearly complete.
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I’ve had a peep at the latest release and found a couple of issues which I’ve reported on GitHub. Can’t wait until you’ve implemented the Multisection feature. Presumably that’s why the role/template options are disabled?