Notes

What Are Notes?
Entering or Editing Notes for People

Finding Text in a Note Field
Default Note Fields
Adding Note Fields to a Person's Record
Deleting Note Fields from a Person's Record
Importing Notes

Saving and Seeing Notes
Cutting, Copying, Pasting Text in Note Fields
Text Style and Color in Notes

The Contextual Menu in Note Fields

Web Page Addresses (URLs) in Note Fields
Tables in Note Fields

What Are Notes?

In Reunion, notes are free-form text relating to a person. A note field is a single, scrolling text field holding up to 64,000 characters. You may enter up to 200 note fields per person.

Notes typically require several lines. If only one line is required for a piece of information, it should be entered as a fact. Examples of items that you might enter as notes include...

If you want to record free-form text relating to an entire branch of your family, or to particular surnames, you should consider using the Log feature.

Entering or Editing Notes for People

To record notes or to edit some notes you've already entered, click directly on any note field in the family view (such as Misc. notes).

This will open the Notes section of the Edit Person panel, shown below.

The left side of the Notes section contains a scrolling list of the different types of notes you've entered for a person. By clicking on the title of the note field (on the left side), the contents of that note field appear on the right side.

You can type directly into the note fields. Note fields are one of the few places where pressing the Return key is not the equivalent of clicking Done. Here the Return key is used to create paragraphs. New paragraphs (or blank lines between paragraphs) will make your reports more readable.

The position of your cursor in a note field is remembered when you close and reopen the field.

Finding Text in a Note Field

When the Notes section of the Edit Person panel is open, you can find text in a note field by clicking the Find button (under the note field), pressing Command+F, or choosing Edit > Find > Find from the menubar at the top.

Then enter the text you'd like to find in the Find on This Page window and press Return/Enter or click the Next button.

If the search text is found, it will be highlighted in the note field...

Default Note Fields

When you add new people, a Misc. Notes field will appear by default, waiting for your entries. You can configure your own set of default note fields which will appear every time you add a new person to your family file. In fact, you'll save lots of time if you set up the correct set of default notes early on in your research.

Adding Note Fields to a Person's Record

To add a note field that doesn't appear by default...

  1. In the Edit Person > Notes panel, click the Add Note button.
  2. Select the note field in the list that appears.
  3. Click Add Note. (If the selected note field is not a default note field and you want it to become one, check the button just under the list.)

If you don't see the note field you need, click the Note Preferences button to define your own note fields.

Deleting Note Fields from a Person's Record

To delete a note field, select the note field in the list (on the left) and click the Delete Note button.

A confirmation/warning will appear if the note field has any contents (because this can't be undone).

You can also delete every occurrence of a note in a family file.

Importing Notes

The Import Notes button lets you import unformatted text files of up to 64,000 characters directly from disk into any note field. The imported text will be appended to existing text, if any.

If Reunion determines that importing a text file will exceed the capacity of a note field, you will be given the option to import a partial file.

HTML, RTF, and MS Word document files may be imported; however, formatting is stripped from these files when imported into a note field. MS Word .docx files are not supported.

Saving and Seeing Notes

When you are finished entering or editing notes, exit the Edit Person panel by clicking Done, pressing the Enter key, or choosing an item in the navbar or sidebar. Reunion will save your changes.

The notes you've added or changed will appear in the family view if the current family view includes those particular note fields. If not, then you need to change or customize the family view. For longer note entries, only the first few paragraphs will appear in the family view.

Cutting, Copying, Pasting Text in Note Fields

While editing text in note fields (or any other field in Reunion), standard Mac keyboard shortcuts may be used to edit text. Learn more.

See this note about pasting text and stripping color, style, pictures, etc., from the text in the Clipboard (i.e., pasting just the plain text and nothing else).

Pasting Pictures Into Note Fields

macOS lets you paste a picture just about anywhere. If you attempt to paste a picture into a note field, it will appear temporarily, but will not be saved when you exit the Edit Person panel. Likewise, the background color of text and any text alignment will be removed when notes are saved.

Remember that pictures are linked to people, families, and source records; not to fields, or in fields.

Text Style and Color in Notes

Note fields permit styled and colored text.

To change the style of selected text, use the four Text Style buttons. To change the color of selected text, use the Text Color button.

You may also choose a text style and color while no text is selected, and your choices will apply to text when you begin typing.

Clicking outside the color palette or pressing the Escape key will close the color palette.

Visual Clues

In the Notes section of the Edit Person panel, empty note fields will appear with gray titles in the list.

The Contextual Menu in Note Fields

Some features are accessible in a contextual menu when Control-clicking text in note fields. For example, you can look up a clicked word in Apple's Dictionary application, or search for the word using Google.

In this example, we've selected and Control-clicked the words "Ellis Island" in a note field...

You can also add a clickable web address/URL to a note field, as described below.

Adding a Web Address (URL) in a Note Field

There are two ways to add a link (aka web address/URL) to a note field...

  1. Drag the text from the location field in the browser and drop it into a note field in Reunion. The link will appear in the note field as underlined text, ala this example...
  2. From a browser...

The behavior of URLs in other fields is explained here.

Editing the Destination of a Link in a Note Field

To edit the destination of the link, Control-click the linked word(s) in the note field and choose Edit Link from the menu shown below.

A small window will appear with a field for the link destination.

Removing a Link in a Note Field

To remove a link in a note field...

  1. Open the Edit Person > Notes panel.
  2. Control-click the underlined text (where the link appears) and choose Remove Link.
Tables in Note Fields

Reunion's note fields do not have special table features as do word processors.

If you attempt to copy and paste data from a table in your word processor — columns and rows of text — into Reunion's note fields, you'll discover that the table or columns may appear crooked. Similarly, if you type in columnar material and then print a report, you may notice the columns becoming jumbled.

Columns of material might include census data, or something like pastoral appointments: year appointed, year served, circuit, district, residence, salary.

The reason for the crooked columns lies in the nature of fonts. Some fonts require the same horizontal space for every character. These are called monospaced fonts. Other fonts have characters of different widths. For example, the "i" character requires less space than a "w" character. Since Reunion doesn't support Tab characters in note fields, you'll need to work with the font selection in order to get straight columns. To do this, first make sure you enter the same number of spaces between each column in a note field.

If you print a person/family group sheet directly from Reunion, you should make sure the notes are being printed with a monospaced font, such as Courier or Monaco. Changing the fonts in person sheets is explained here; family group sheets are explained here.

If the destination of a report is your word processor, you will have to change the font after the report has opened in the word processor. To do this, you can highlight the notes in your word processor and then select a monospaced font from one of the word processor's menus.