Persona - Eventa - Event - Individual

The diagram shows a simplified (?) version of the links between the Persona, Eventa, Event and Individual entities. The first thing to notice about this relationship is that is cyclic and thus contains redundant data. This means that if any of the four link records (EP, EEa, IE or IP) are missing, they can be reconstructed.

The diagram also shows that although the Event and Eventa share a 'Type', they have separate 'Date' and 'Place' records. The eventa's date and place records will be specific to the reference document, whist the event's date and place may be generalised, and possibly linked to several eventa.

Personal Events

Personal events are those events, that help describe a person. They given various names by other systems: Properties, Facts, Attributes, Characteristics or Traits prompting the acronym PFACT (perhaps this should now become PEFACT). They are events such as 'Occupation' or 'Residency'.

Personal events tend to extend over a period of time, they may slowly change (such as personal description i.e. hair colour) or suddenly (as in residency). When they appear in historic records, they generally describe the event as it appears on a particular day. We can refer to these as 'Snapshot Events'.

Each individual has a single event for any given personal event type, we call this the 'Summary Event'. The summary event is made up of one or more separate events obtained from the historic record.

An example: we have a record (say a census) that gives the occupation of a Persona as "Journeyman Mason". The Persona has already been linked to an Individual so these records and a IP link have previously been created. We then create an Eventa of Type "Occupation" and create an EP record which links the Persona. The EP link has the note "Journeyman Mason" attached and points to the "Mason" Role record.

Because the Persona has already been linked to an Individual, this will cause an Event record to be created and linked to the Eventa record with a EEa link and the Individual with a IE record. This IE record will also point to the higher IE record of the Summary Event. If the Summary Event does not exist, then it will be created.

Family Relationships Event

A 'Family' record is a specialised event which only exists on the Conclusion side. The Family record has the links to two partners built-in to the record, and the IE links to the children are replaced with FI links.

To represent the family on the Evidence side we use an Eventa record of Type "Family Relationship". This Eventa can have one or two Partner Persona and zero or more Child Persona attached.

Note, the FIEa link record shown in the diagram is currently experimental and may be removed in the released version.