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I’d like to bring up the topic of having witnesses in your genealogy data, and then how these should be represented in GEDCOM, the standard for transferring genealogical data.
What is a Witness?
A Witness is a person who sees an event.
Often genealogical documents include signatures of witnesses, typically on birth, marriage, or death records.
For FAN analysis (Friends, Associates, Neighbours), a witness may refer to some or even all the people who are at an event.
For example for a marriage, you can list some or all the people who attended the wedding ceremony. For a death, you can list all the people who attended the funeral. You may want to indicate the role they played, e.g. best man, bridesmaid, ring bearer, master of ceremonies, pallbearer, etc.
Events in a genealogical sense tend to be personal or family events. But there’s no reason why people cannot be witnesses at other events, e.g. a coronation, an earthquake, a concert, or whatever. These events are associated with a place rather than with a person or family.
There is no standard way for genealogical software to handle witnesses. Each program chooses its own way to represent them, and may allow you to add them from people and/or families and/or places and/or sources, and some programs may not support witnesses at all.
Displaying Witness Information in a Program
The way a program displays witness information is also unique to each program.
I think the correct way is to display each witness in two places:
- Where the event is listed, so that all witnesses can be listed together, and
- Where the person who is the witness is listed, so that all events that (s)he is a witness for can be listed by date in their profile.
In Behold, the event that is the birth of Edward Smith might look like:
Edward Smith
Birth in Essex, England, Thu 3 Aug 1780
Source: Smith Bible S13-8
Witness. Godmother. Anna Chordray XXX-1
Witness. Midwife. Elizabeth Conyer XXX-3
Witness. Saw birth. Rachel Moore SMI-4
and the reference from the person who is the witness might be this::
Anna Chordray
Witness Birth of Edward Smith SMI-3, Thu 3 Aug 1780 in Essex, England, role Godmother
Transferring Witness information via GEDCOM
The trouble is that there currently is no standard way to specify witness information in GEDCOM.
Why not?
Well, there used to be a way. Go far back to the year 1993 when GEDCOM 5.3 was produced. It did have a WITN tag in its specification which looked like this:
n @XREF:EVEN@ EVEN
+1 <<CHANGE_DATE>> {0:M}
+1 <EVENT_TAG> {1:1}
+2 TYPE <EVENT_DESCRIPTOR> {0:1}
+2 DATE <DATE_VALUE> {0:1}
+2 <PLACE_STRUCTURE>> {0:1}
+2 PERI <TIME_PERIOD> {0:M}
+2 RELI <RELIGIOUS_AFFILIATION> {0:1}
+2 <<MULTI_MEDIA_LINK>> {0:M}
+2 <<TEXT_STRUCTURE>> {0:1}
+2 <<SOUR_STRUCTURE>> {0:M}
+2 <<NOTE_STRUCTURE>> {0:M}
+2 <ROLE_TAG> {0:M}
+3 TYPE <ROLE_DESCRIPTOR> {0:1}
+3 <<INDIVIDUAL>> {0:1}
+3 ASSO @XREF:INDI@ {0:M}
+4 TYPE <ASSOCIATION_DESCRIPTOR> {1:1}
+3 <RELATIONSHIP_ROLE_TAG>
[ NULL | @XREF:INDI@ ] {0:M}
+4 TYPE <ROLE_DESCRIPTOR> {0:1}
+4 <<INDIVIDUAL>> {0:1}
ROLE_TAG:= {Size=1:20}
[ BUYR | CHIL | FATH | GODP | HDOH | HDOG | HEIR | HFAT | HMOT | USB | INFT | LEGA | MEMBER| MOTH | OFFI | PARE | PHUS | PWIF | RECO | EL | ROLE | SELR | TXPY | WFAT | WIFE | WITN | WMOT | INDI ]
A tag that indicates the role of the individuals mentioned in a source event record. If the above list does not include the role being cited, use the ROLE_TAG followed by a ROLE_DESCRIPTOR to define the role. (See appendix A for the definition of these tags and Appendix B for additional ROLEs which have been proposed as GEDCOM tags). Names of individuals mentioned in the event but their role was not mentioned, should be identified by using the INDI role tag. Any associations between others of known roles and this individual can be shown by using the ASSOciation pointer.
In GEDCOM Version 5.3, events were top level records. WITN was one of many ROLE_TAGs that were under an event. They seem to have been designed so as to be able to include every person who had anything at all to do with the event, and that is what is wanted.
However, I presume the GEDCOM designers thought this was too complicated and in 1995 for the GEDCOM 5.4 draft, they removed the whole kit and caboodle, demoting events to become the substructures: <INDIVIDUAL_EVENT_STRUCTURE> and <FAMILY_EVENT_STRUCTURE>. In doing so, WITN got deleted along with the other ROLE_TAGs as no-one realized at the time the importance of that tag to connect events to people.
Don’t mix up a Witness with an Association
The above GEDCOM 5.3 Event specification included an ASSO (Association) tag and the last line shown says this:
Any associations between others of known roles and this individual can be shown by using the ASSOciation pointer.
However, this was a 5.3 confusion of what an ASSOciation is.
ASSO and WITN are two different things.
- An Association is a connection between two people
- A Witness is a connection between one person and an event.
The most common example of an Association is when one person is a Godparent of another, but it can also be used to state that a person is known to be a cousin when the exact relationship is unknown, or any other connection such as the person’s doctor or lawyer or someone’s best friend or neighbour.
Association was correctly implemented in GEDCOM version 5.4 and later and is placed under an Individual (not an event) and connects to another individual. But somehow, the GEDCOM team did not realize that WITN was needed as well.
Developers Need Witness Information in GEDCOM.
In 1999, the GEDCOM 5.5.1 draft was released. That is the version of GEDCOM still used by almost all genealogy programs today. It still has no WITN tag in it.
What some developers did when they realized that they wanted to save their witness information, was to add their own user-defined tag and they called it _WITN, that is WITN with an underscore preceding it. They included that tag with their own proprietary method of saving their witness info to the GEDCOM file.
The problem with this? This is an extension to GEDCOM and other programs would not know how to read this unless the developer added custom to do so.
The other problem with this? Each program writing witness information to GEDCOM might do so in their own propriety way, because there is no standard for them to follow.
So a WITN information specification needs to be added back into GEDCOM. If the GEDCOM standards developers thought about it for a while, they would see the need. And they’d see that it is not too difficult to implement.
It should be added into the EVENT_DETAIL structure as::
n WITN @<XREF:INDI>@ {0:M}
+1 TYPE <ROLE_DESCRIPTOR> {0:1}
+1 <<NOTE_STRUCTURE>> {0:M}
+1 <<SOURCE_CITATION>> {0:M}
That’s all that would be need to satisfy most developers, myself included.
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