Add an Occupation Box

Jaelene Starr

I would like to request that an Occupation box be added to the Detail page on the right side as the 6th box. Two important things about occupation:

1. It can be an invaluable tool to determining if merges are correct, and if the parents are listed with the correct children. For this reason, it would be helpful if the Occupation is included at the merge screen.
2. The occupation defines a person. I have found that the ancestor occupation is an important bit of information to novices to FamilySearch. Knowing the occupation helps connect us to our ancestors and helps us understand their economic level in society.

Currently occupations is buried in a cumbersome way in other information.

Currently I am using notes to accomplish this. with Occupation as the title and list the year and occupation. Example:

Occupation

1871 census- cotton weaver

(then I list in year order records that list the occupation)

Also, a thanks to all the engineers at FamilySearch. This is really a fantastic bit of software!

Gail Swihart Watson

You can already do this in the "Other Information" section. When you click "Add Event", Occupation is one of the options. Here is an example of how it looks. Note that you can have sources attached to the occupation. I was referencing a letter from Denmark which indicated the son had started helping the father on his fishing boat. I could have made memory sources from that, but did not.

EDIT: I see I missed your comment where you said it was buried in Other Information. I disagree that it needs a higher level of importance. It is not vital information, but I agree it would be helpful to view in merges.

Alan E. Brown

The Occupation is already shown in merges. It's in the Other Information section, along with Residences and other events and facts. So it is exactly where it should be during the merge process, available to examine as you compare two people in the Tree to determine if they truly represent the same person.

The proposal to use Notes to record occupational data is quite counterproductive. Notes can't be tagged to sources as the Occupation event can, so there's no direct link to the sources that document the Occupation. And Notes aren't visible in a merge, but the Occupation event is. Those two points alone make it clear that using the Occupation event is far superior to Notes for recording Occupation information.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I agree with Gail that it doesn't make sense to give occupation extra prominence: yes, it can help to tell John Smith the cobbler from John Smith the smith, but what about the vastly more common scenario, where they were both farmers? Occupation also will not help identify women, who were all housewives/homemakers. Do you really want to emphasize a detail that's simply not applicable to at least half of your relatives?

I've never paid much attention to what happens to occupations in merges -- most of my ancestors were farmers, so I haven't entered anything in Other Information for them -- so I did a small test in beta. In the first merge screen, the two occupations are lined up side-by-side.

In the second screen, the second occupation is automatically brought over, but you can put it back (effectively deleting it).

The system does not alert to the difference between them, which makes sense: people could and did change occupations over the course of their lives, and even when they didn't, the same occupation can be recorded in many different ways. (Chandler, grocer, shopkeeper, merchant, mercator, chramarius, ...)

Jaelene Starr

I still would prefer an occupation box in the right column of the detail page, with the same ability to be included in merges. I personally think that the occupation is an important bit of information for both the researcher and the casual FS user. Perhaps even include it on the about page. (It would be fun to have an associated image with it on the about page.) To me the current location is too hidden.

As I do a lot of research in England, I find many varied occupations, but it makes sense that in the US, for example, most are farmers.

I was disappointed to discover that records whose indexing includes occupation, such as some census, does not automatically send the occupation to the current place for occupations. It would take a computer minutes to do so.

Gordon Collett

You may want to sketch up exactly where you want this box and how you want it to appear. Be sure to include how you would deal with multiple occupations with multiple year ranges. That is an important part of a person's history. I find it fun to watch through the census records the progression through life: son, student, apprentice, master or complete changes in occupation at different times in life. Occupation is not a static piece of information like a birth date.

Jaelene Starr

This would be an example. Have the Occupation as the header, then dates and records indicating this occupation below. That way, if there are multiple occupations, it would be easy to see the progression as they move to a new profession.

I would make a new box in the main column of the details page labeled Occupation. Perhaps with 2 columns available if there is more than one occupation. I would like it single spaced, with the minimal information listed below. Each line should be hot linked to more information (with sources available).

On the About page I would suggest just the occupation and a picture. A hotlink on the occupation can go to a more detailed page.

AI could generate all of the icon/illustrations for each occupation so there would be no copyright issues.

I cannot emphasize enough how this would help with my research in trying to separate families correctly.

Jaelene Starr

Also, I greatly encourage that those records where the occupation has been indexed, that the FS software automatically insert the occupation in the appropriate field.