Forms, Buttons, and Formatting

View walking up to the Church.

I spent most of last Thursday searching YouTube videos on how to make my database look more polished through forms, buttons, and lots of formatting!  I was mostly successful, although I am pretty sure there is not a way to create a search bar that allows you to search any piece of information about the deceased and have it pull up that individual. There is, however, a way to create a search bar that will perform a specific query, such as a first or last name (but not both!). So I will probably just end up adding one of these next Thursday. Then I have to double check my data, as I only got about half way through last Thursday, and then I am done the database! Next, I will be reading a lot of sources to create my annotated bibliography. I anticipate at this point I will be inundating my blog with interesting things I find in the literature! Here is a screen shot of my database:

The "More Info" button when clicked leads to a new page which displays all other available information I could find about that particular burial. This includes monument class, plot type, plot section, monument materials, inscriptions, motifs, age of deceased, birth and death years and dates, occupation, cause of death, and any other notes that are relevant, but do not fit in the above categories. Of course not all of this information is available for all burials so there are definitely blanks among these categories for many of the burials. Also, because the Thomson burial had 6 people on the monument, of which I included all in my database, all of the forms contain spots for up to 6 first and last names, birth and death dates/years, and ages. Because the burials are so variable in the quantity of people on the monument, I had to make a standardised form that would accommodate them all. This means that most of the forms have many blanks because most only had one or two people named on them. However, I could not find any other way to mitigate this, so while a bit of an inconvenience, it is not that bad. Here is a shot of the form:

You have to scroll down and to the right a bit to get all of the information, but it is still pretty easy to nab the information you need. Formatting this form took me ages! Getting all of the columns to line up, and making sure the text boxes all had the same width required a lot of fiddling with formatting, but it felt amazing once it was done! So that is my database! All 54 entries are in and once it is entirely complete, I will be discussing how it can be made available to anyone that is interested. There is more information in it than just that which is displayed on the monument. It also has information I gathered for genealogy forms. I would like to note that while I did include all names on the monuments, even if some went past my 1911 end date (I think the latest is 1929), I did not include genealogy information about the deceased that were buried after 1911. I included their names as I did not want to omit information that was actually on the monument, but because they are much more recent, I also did not want to include extra information on them as I did with those people who did fall into the Victorian date range I am using (1869-1911). That is it for now, but while looking through my photos I found one that I would like to share here. It is close to one I have posted before, but imparts a bit of a different view and atmosphere. It is my favourite photo that I have taken to date.