Roy Sprunger

Sorry, Terry. Was just trying to help. Won't happen again.

John,

The help is appreciated. I learned, just as Terry has, that the concept of Township and its importance varies disproportionately across our country. My original position was heavily biased by the area I live in where it is local government.

However, because it is lesser or no importance in other states, I have had to rethink its importance to my own data collection and relate it to the specific source information or localized event, I want to capture. Most rural cemeteries in Michigan are organized and managed by the township board of the township they reside in.

Never be sorry for trying to help, because you may never know who has been helped. I, for one, appreciate what you wrote as it offers a different perspective, just as Terry did. Since these posts will linger for as long as the forum exists, it may help somebody else years from now.

I've been using TMG since 1999 (or earlier, but I can't remember) and joined this forum soon after it came online.

Between here and the Rootsweb TMG archives, there is a wealth of information, but it does take some work to ferret it out.

Roy

I can't speak for for Wholly Genes, but would offer these comments.

 

First, I've never found townships as repositories of useful records. There are no doubt exceptions, but I'd have to conclude that they are rare.

 

Further, there is nothing remotely uniform about the nature of townships across the states. Many states, most I'd guess, don't even have them. Those that do treat them in a variety of ways. In at least some cases they are municipalities, which means that they are in fact equivalent to towns and cities. In those cases there is no incorporated town or city that shares the same area with a township. However, in many places there can be unincorporated but recognized villages within townships, just as they can exist within incorporated towns and cities.

 

Other states seem to treat townships is different ways, some of which I don't understand. And, of course, the term township is also used in western surveying, which has nothing to do with townships which are governmental units.

 

Given the diversity of meanings to the term township, I don't know how any standard approach to recording them might work. Do you have a suggestion?

Terry, once again you have given me direction. Thank you.

Your reply prompted me to look into just what "townships" are, so I started with Wikipedia. I had no idea there was such disparity. It appears the concept in use in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest is not shared by the rest of the country. While the term is used nationwide, as well as in foreign countries, the meaning and use varies greatly.

However, my interest and concern has nothing to do with "repositories of useful records", so much as finding a location where an event happened. When I read a diary, journal or newspaper article that was originally written in say, 1839, and it names a township that no longer exists in the present day, I want to document it as a location. Given what I have learned through my research today, I have to agree with your conclusion. Townships, apparently, are more meaningful to Michiganders than most other citizens.

Township <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Township>.

While cities, towns, boroughs, or villages are common terms for municipalities; townships, counties, and parishes are sometimes not considered to be municipalities.

Civil township <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_township>.

In Michigan, general law townships can incorporate as charter townships, a status intended to protect against annexation from nearby municipalities and which grants the township some home rule powers similar to cities.

The majority of family branches I am working on came into Michigan starting with the year it became a state, in 1837. So far, everybody entered or settled through Branch, Hillsdale, Calhoun & Jackson counties. So my focus has been on this area, as well as Northeast Indiana & Northwest Ohio; and will be for some time yet.

Consequently, the only suggestion I can offer, is this. Individual users have to determine for themselves the significance of including township designations in recording locations and use the tools that are available, such as using split memos.

I have tried to incorporate township names by redesignating the arrangement of place lables, then used them in the City [L3] field, County [L4] field, and more recently, the Temple [L10] field; but have been dissatisfied with the results in every case. Now, I am looking at using split memo citations, at least for Michigan and the surrounding states where the great majority of cemeteries are organized by township; not county and not municipality. But, I then need to keep a master list or guide for what each [M1], [RM2] or [CM5] will be used for; e.g. a schema for each type of memo.

The use of townships will be driven by what I need to record and cannot be applied as a universal standard. This methodology will also serve for other non-standard locations although I have taken to using the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to get LAT/LONG.

Roy

Why have American townships been ignored and continue to be ignored, by TMG (at least since version 4), as a viable location when so many sources and repositories have made them important in identifying locations in rural or Early America? What was the rationale? Does anybody know anymore?

While the members have often found workarounds to include Townships in their location places, they are just that, workarounds. I am very curious about why they have been ignored for so many years. Storing the information in fields other than where it belongs, between City and County, requires a lot of extra effort in managing the data, unnecessarily, in my opinion, especially when identifying where records are or were kept.

Roy

Maybe list the valid characters rather than the invalid ones?

Thanks, Jim & John. I phrased the question as I did hoping somebody from the team that works on the program would comment, as they are the only ones who can answer the question, "When will something be done to either fix the program or change the Help file?"

My solution was to annotate the help file entry with the excluded special characters.

However, it defies explanation for why a "label" should have any limitations. By their very nature, they are simply "labels" used to name something. To the best of my knowledge, TMG does not execute any programming code that uses the label, which would make any code that inhibits the use of any keyboard character, bad code writing, or at the very least, negligent. On the other hand, I can also see this as being so low on a list priority fixes as to be negligible in the greater scheme of things.

Still, it is pushing six years now since this bug was identified. That is a long time to allow any bug to persist. And I have not seen any boards dedicated to reporting bugs.

Roy

I found a 2005 message Terry Reigel posted in which he said,

Yes - the problem is use of special characters in the flag names.

Currently the following cannot be used in flag names:

 

- " ' : ; [ ] { } \ ` ~ |

 

Some of these will likely work in the next release, and others may not

- don't know yet which.

There have been several releases since this was originally posted in 2005.

When will something be done to either fix the program or change the Help file? Help still states, "Flag names (up to 51 characters) and values (one character) can be entered using upper or lower case letters, numbers, and any characters except comma. A pound sign (#) can be used in the values section, but not in the name. Spaces can be used in the name, but not as a value."

I believe a reasonable person would expect that to mean ANY keyboard character. But when there are limitations or restrictions, those should be clearly stated.

Roy

Open the Focus Group.

 

If it isn't empty, click [Remove All].

 

Click [Add Individual] and select and add the first person.

 

Click on the one name to select it. Select only 'Descendants' and set the generation count. If you want all descendants, the default 250 is fine. Click [Add Others] to add the descendants.

 

Click [select All] to select all names. Select only 'Spouses' and click [Add Others] to add the spouses.

 

The critical thing to understand is that the [Add Others] operation only applies to the names selected when you click the button to add others.

Thank you, Jim. That will certainly work! The result was very much what I wanted.

Roy

You can add the people directly to the Focus Group. Just make sure at each step that the people whom you have selected and the option you are ticking gives the result you want.

 

With the Focus Group open: Click Add Individual - enter the ID number

 

Select (highlight) the individual

Tick Spouses and press Add Others

(You have husband and wife)

 

Select (highlight) both the individual and the spouse

Tick Descendants and 1 generation (for their children)

Press Add Others

(You have husband, wife, and 1 generation of their children)

 

Select all the children

Tick Spouses

Press Add Others

(You have husband, wife, their children and the spouses of the children)

 

You can give the Focus Group a name and save it for future use.

 

Virginia

How do I select just one individual, then tell TMG to go & find all the descendants & their spouses, and add them to the focus group in one operation?

Roy

The forum keeps logging me out every time I opened a link in a new tab or clicked on one of the other forum links.

And sometimes when I fill out the username and password again, and click on log in, it doesn’t recognize me. My preferred browser is Google Chrome.

Browser: Google Chrome

OS: Windows XP SP3

Connection is via Satellite.

However, when I use Mozilla Firefox, I do not have this problem. I searched your Help area on cookies and found you do not have anything on Chrome. Has it not been tested for compatibility with the website?

Roy

Help says that you can't use a comma in a flag name.

 

"Flag names (up to 51 characters) and values (one character) can be entered using upper or lower case letters, numbers, and any characters except comma. A pound sign (#) can be used in the values section, but not in the name. Spaces can be used in the name, but not as a value."

 

There appear to be other limitations from your tests.

Thanks, Jim. I must have been staring at the monitor for too long.

I looked at the page where it is located and initially, I still didn't see it. I must have read it three times before it sunk in. I also found a 2005 message Terry Reigel posted in which he said,

Yes - the problem is use of special characters in the flag names.

Currently the following cannot be used in flag names:

- " ' : ; [ ] { } \ ` ~ |

Some of these will likely work in the next release, and others may not

- don't know yet which.

I have added a note to my growing list of annotations that the phrase "any characters except comma" is still incorrect.

Roy

Did you try adding quotes around words to make phrases? That seemed to work for me, but I only did a couple test queries.

Hi John,

Problem solved after they upgraded the forum software. Searching is much more robust now.

Take care.

Roy

Years ago I originally reported this to the TMG-L list. I think it was ver. 4.0 Gold. With ver. 7.04 Gold, I still get the error box stating "Flag label <label name> contains an illegal character".

I can find nothing about this error. Help implies I should be able to use any keyboard character in my label. However, several punctuation keys and special characters cause this error. I did not test all the punctuation and special characters, but these do cause the error.

: ; , [ ] |

Since this is a narrative description field, I should be able to use any keyboard characters OR there should be an entry in the Help telling me which keys are reserved.

When I initially created my custom flags, TMG accepted them as I had typed them in. But now that I want to edit them, I get the error message. Here are a few examples.

GENE: Sprunger, Christian complete

GENE: Owens, Uriah

GENE: Scoville, Edward complete

But when I changed the punctuation, TMG accepted it as shown in the next example.

GENE> Sprunger Peter complete

While it may be a small thing, it prevents me from taking further advantage of custom flags, as I see no advantage in being unable to use the descriptions that I use in other areas.

Roy Sprunger

anetsprungen

Craig,

Thanks for posting the list. I found it very interesting.

But to answer your request, I believe the words that appear to be occupations may in fact be adjectives, adverbs & verbs used to modify the principle, e.g. the 'farm laborer' has a relationship to the principle as a "farm laborer". It appears to be all on how you view the context of usage. Although, I have never heard of a 'cousin-in-law'. Some do seem odd in the context of current usage, but they are probably archaic & were common 150-300 years ago, such as 'Bound Boy'.

Any other thoughts out there?

Roy

deleted duplicate post

And that's the problem. As I said in my earlier resonse, you can't both limit the number of generations, and also add the spouses in a simple filter. If you put just ID# 1448 in the filter, you can add descendants for that person and add spouses for that person, but that doesn't add the spouses for the descendants.

Thanks, Terry. But if I'm going to go through that much trouble for what should be a simple query, then I would be better off buying FoxPro and creating my own queries against the database directly. I have been a database user, programmer and administrator for almost twenty years using different platforms and I always seem to gravitate towards creating my own custom queries because the application defaults for generating reports are typically handicapped along simple lines.

I understand TMG is still based on the FoxPro database architecture and the data is accessible to the application. Maybe its time to give serious thought to buying a copy, just so I can get what I want the way I want it. Meanwhile, I have more records to key in. Take care.

Roy Sprunger/Assyria, MI

The problem is you are asking for the descendants twice. The first time is in the filter itself, where you ask for the descendants of ID#1448. This request has no limits on the number of generations.

 

Then, you are asking for 4 generations of the folks specified above - actually there won't be any, as you can see if you check the filter progress screen, because you have already specified all the descendants of ID#1448 be included.

 

Finally, you are asking for the spouses of the people specified in the filter itself, that is, the spouses of the descendants of ID# 1448.

 

You cannot both limit the number of generations of descendants and add spouses in a simple filter. You can do it by using a temporary flag and making two filter passes. But it's probably easier to do with the Focus group, depending on what you want to accomplish with the results.

 

My article on People Filters may help with the details.

Hi Terry,

Thanks. As I continued experimenting I finally realized that TMG was creating the subset, then adding all the descendants. I made what I believe a lot of people do, is the reasonable assumption that the lower portion of the filter is a MODIFIER of the condition of the filter. I had to read the Help several times before it sank in that it is a modifier but not in the way I thought it was.

I read your page and unfortunately, it still doesn't answer the question, How do I limit the number of generations?

The filter screen clearly shows a place for limiting the number of generations. How do I use it? All I want is four generations of descendants with their spouses from one progenitor. At first that seemed easy to do.

Since this is a throw-away report, only to be used for comparison, and will be run for three or four generation blocks of people, I have added a date. While some people don't have a birth date, still, it will give me working list. I'll just have to fudge around the people that don't show. There may still be a way to get what I want. It just takes fiddling with the controls.

Roy Sprunger/Assyria, MI

Hi everybody.

A new problem.

I am trying to filter a List of People report where "Is a Descendant" "of ID #" equals "1448" "And then add their" "Spouses" and "Descendants" for "4" generations. However, I get a list of 1333 people versus the 400+ I expect to get.

Is the generations counter not working or am I trying to use it out of context?

For example, the youngest person in this group would have been born in the 1860s, but the results include myself and my siblings, as well as other younger relatives.

Roy Sprunger/Assyria, MI

You apparently are selecting the name using the mouse and dragging if over the name and including spaces after the name...if you place the cursor in the name and ctrl+a you will select the name only and not all of the spaces after it...The name field is a fixed length field and if you highlight the name and spaces after it that is what will be copied....

lawrpaul,

You apparently overlooked part of my statement, "the Windows habit is to simply double click on the word to select it."

However, I appreciate your prompt response and tip. Clicking in the field and using ctrl-a is definitely an acceptable solution. I do a lot of control-key work on the keyboard with my left hand while having the mouse in my right.

Thanks.

Roy

I have noticed for some time now that when I select a fields contents, for example a name field, copy it, then paste it somewhere else, like in Notepad, there are a bunch of blank or empty spaces following the text. Below is an example. I replaced the spaces with "+" signs.

Baumgartner+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+++++++++++

That is a lot of blank spaces to delete.

Is there a way to trim off the blank spaces or force the program to only select the text and not the whole field contents? For example, I know I can select the characters individually but the Windows habit is to simply double click on the word to select it. Unfortunately, the program grabs the entire field with all those blanks.

Roy Sprunger/Assyria, MI

I have been out of touch with TMG & Wholly Genes for awhile, but have a renewed interest. I recently upgraded TMG and SS. So, I have been searching through the TMG Archives on RootsWeb, my old e-mail messages, and I had thought to use this forum as well. But, that has turned out to be counter-productive more than half the time.

Where most forums I visit, especially regarding computer hardware & software, allow me to specify whole and exact search phrases, this forum does not. There is no help and no way to search for a four word phrase. I frequently search for phrases based on TMG dialog boxes and information screens, such as "word processor conversion engine". In this forum, the search engine searches for every instance of every word, which is useless for my purposes.

When will Wholly Genes Community upgrade their forum software to permit exact phrase searches? I would rather get no hits, than a bunch of useless and meaningless hits.

Roy Sprunger

Thanks, Glenn. Your point taken is well taken.

While nothing lasts forever, the best we can hope for is to extend the life of whatever medium we choose, as long as possible. The only hope of doing that right now, is printing our data on acid-free paper, preferably in a bound book. Until then, everything else is transitory. My goal is to keep my information dynamic for as long as possible so as to ensure its usefulness. 'Cause one thing is for sure, if anybody waits too long to use my information, they will most likely have to rekey everything from scratch. By then, I'll be long gone and beyond caring.

Roy Sprunger/Assyria, MI

You make an excellent point.

 

Having given this quite a lot of thought for a bit over a week, at this point I'm still not going to save piles of paper. Perhaps I have a dominant "loses organizational integrity" gene, but I just can't see spending a lot of time filling filing cabinets full of things I may never be able to find again (even with the best of schemes) - not to mention the fact that when I get too old or too feeble, my relatives will probably just cart it all to the landfill...

 

For now - I think I will replicate selected sites and pkzip them... and pray that Windows Explorer and/or its successors will support today's implementation of HTML/etc.

Jim,

I'm with you, but with a twist. I have Adobe Acrobat v7 Pro. When I find a website with content I want to preserve, I open it in IE and convert it to a PDF document or print it to a PDF printer. My citation then cites the website and makes the PDF file an exhibit. With the increasing capacities of USB/Firewire devices approaching/exceeding those of DVDs, that has become my primary mode of backup storage. However, the probable continuation of CD-ROM discs remains a viable source for sharing content with others. Paper is no more permanent than any other medium. Besides, not all sources are pertinent to just people.

I have been researching Swiss place names heavily this week, trying to match up current names/spellings with what has been historically documented in previously published genealogies, with only partial luck. Wikipedia now has a lot of information it didn't have before and I will document the place name changes accordingly. The main compiler for one piece of work had no understanding of the subdivisions of Swiss communities, nor how several cantons moved from German spellings to French in recent years.

I believe we need to get away from the prevalence of documentary evidence and into electronic evidence, which is the main reason I dropped off the RootsWeb mailing list. There just wasn't enough interest in citing/storing electronic information.

Roy Sprunger/Assyria, MI