# Person record

A person record is the most important record type in a genealogical database. Such a record contains all the information about a person. GEDKeeper allows you to store the full name, nickname, and sex in a person record. You can list all events and facts that relate to the person's life. Using GEDKeeper you easily investigate family and social relations of the person (associations with other people). GEDKeeper never restricts you in the number of a person's families and children. Also, you can divide people by different social groups, add additional indicators to improve obviousness (references), add unlimited number of notes, multimedia materials and sources, and add a person's portrait for displaying in trees.

This is the list of dialog tabs and respective data categories you can change:

- Events represents an event or fact from person's life.
- Families lists marriages of person or family relations; common children are specified in the dedicated dialog.
- Names - a list of all full names of a given person; possible: in different languages ​​and different types (by birth, by marriage, by adoption, creative pseudonym).
- Associations lists a person's social relations.
- Groups is a way to unite persons by social relations, which makes navigation and search more effective.
- Notes is arbitrary text about person.
- Multimedia attaches photos, scanned documents, and portraits.
- Sources represents used documents, correspondence, and other kinds of source of information about a person.
- User references is an additional indicator for GEDKeeper itself or a way to create handy a classification.
- Parents - a list of links to the parents' families (in general - only one, in cases of adoption, guardianship, etc. - there may be several).
- Children- a list of all children of a given person from all marriages/relationships.

## Changing person information

Surname / Married surname / Name / Patronymic
  Fields for entering the main part of information about a person's name. There may be several full names (in different languages, different subtypes), so these fields change only parts of the first full name (see the "Names" tab).
  Features:
  - Pressing the keys [ `Ctrl + Down` ] in the fields for entering the last name, married last name, first name and patronymic - leads to "unification" of the corresponding line, the first letters of the words become capital, the rest - lowercase.
  - Warning: using the "/" symbol in the main name fields (last name, first name, patronymic) is prohibited, this may lead to errors in the database.
  - If the person edit dialog was opened when adding a new child to a parent, then the drop-down list of patronymics will contain a list of patronymics according to the father's name.
Surname Prefix / Name Prefix / Name Suffix / Nickname
  Fields responsible for additional information about a person's name: all kinds of nicknames, titles, prefixes and suffixes of the surname or name.
Portrait
  Portrait control buttons (assign/remove) appear when you hover the cursor over the portrait area. When adding a person's photo, you can select the preferred region of the photo (if the photo is too large or a group).
Parents
  - Editing a person's parents is done in the form of a special dedicated panel with two fields, where the father and mother of the person being edited are displayed, as well as three groups of buttons. This is done for maximum editing flexibility. The group of buttons , and to the right of the parent name fields is intended to manage the link to the parents' family as a whole. That is, if the parents' family to which you need to attach this person already exists, you can attach it using the button . If you need to edit some data of an already attached family, you can do this using the button , that is, edit the family without closing the current dialog of the person. Using the button there, to the right of the parents' names, a person is disconnected from the parents' family.
  - The same buttons , and under the name of each parent are responsible for something else: the button - adds a new family, if none was connected before, and adds a specific parent (father or mother, depending on the selected section) to it, the button accordingly disconnects the selected parent (father/mother) from the family connected to the person. It is also possible to quickly navigate to the parents' records using the buttons .
Families
  Changing spouse data is performed on the corresponding tab using the buttons , and . Calling the operations for adding and changing a spouse leads to opening the family editing window, where all the required actions are performed - adding a spouse, adding events and children. Using the arrow buttons, you can change the order of marriages for a given person.
  - Note: it is important to understand the following points. All relationships in the genealogical database are links from one record to another. A family is the same record (or object) with its own properties, facts and links, as a personal record. A family record is a specialized record for combining two parents, children and facts about a family into one.
  - Therefore, the "Families" tab of the personal record editing dialog is not just a list of spouses of a given person, it is a list of links to the corresponding records of families in which this person is/was a member. That is why, when you click the button on the "Families" tab, the dialog for editing the corresponding family record opens.
  - Therefore, when you delete an item in this list, you actually disconnect the current person from the specified family. There should remain a record of a family with children and one unknown spouse, which was the current person.
Names

  Any person can have several "full names" - i.e. each such name can include parts of the last name, first name, middle name, nickname, etc.

  This is done for those cases when during a person's life, all or some parts have changed. For example, if during adoption, a person changed all parts: last name, first name, middle name. There are also cases (real example), when a child Shirokov Zenovey Efremovich was born, then the parents died, was adopted by godparents and for several years was called Pugov Zenovey Efremovich, and then the middle name changed according to the name of the adopter, the person became Pugov Zenovey Ivanovich.

  In such cases, it is convenient to make three entries of full names in the person record, where there will be a full indication of all parts and a note of the name type.

  In other cases, a person may have several very different names in different languages - when not only the transliteration of names differs, but the surname and first name have completely different spelling and pronunciation.

  Note: the fields for entering parts of the name, located at the top of the person editing dialog - always change the parts of the name that is listed first in the list of names. Any full name can be made first, then it will be the main one for displaying everywhere.

Events / Groups / Notes / Sources / User references
  All types of objects related to a specific person can be changed on the corresponding tabs using the standard buttons , and . For any person, you can specify any number of events that happened to him, his various attributes, notes, photographs and other multimedia records, sources in which he is mentioned, marriages and groups.
Associations
  A special form of records is used to add additional relationships between people. For example, to specify godparents (godfathers) and witnesses (guarantors). When adding associations, you can specify the type and link to a specific person.
Multimedia
  When adding a new or attaching an existing multimedia file (Photo type) to the person being edited, a dialog for selecting the region of the portrait in the photo automatically appears. This is a standard photo viewing dialog with scale buttons (reduce/increase), in which you can select the area of ​​the portrait of a specific person (click and, without releasing the mouse button, drag). In one photo, if you add it from the multimedia list, you can specify several areas of different people. In this case, when viewing a photo from the "Multimedia" tab of the main working window - the portraits of all people will be highlighted, and when you hover over them - an inscription with the name will appear.

Note: Several tabs in this dialog have buttons for the functions "Copy" and "Paste". These functions are very useful when entering large amounts of information in bulk. A detailed description of these functions is in the section Clipboard.

There is a uniting table on the "Persons" tab of the main working window which includes all persons available in the database. A person summary to the right of the table shows all information about the selected person and references to other records.