Mike Talbot

I wish that I had thought of your external exhibit tree a decade ago. All of my exhibits are kept in a single folder. It's too late for my exhibit strategy to change (over 11,000 mostly JPG files). Please consider the advantages of backing up your exhibits separately from TMG now that flash drives are so inexpensive. Every time that exhibits are added, back them up. It is unusual to find more than a few new exhibits per month once your database is long established. But it is rare that a day goes by without finding a new tidbit of data or a minor correction to your working dataset. My working TMG dataset backup is about 200MB and my exhibits backup is in the GB category. I usually backup TMG data more than once per week (depending on TMG time spent). It is much faster to do and the backup is a more manageable size without the huge exhibit data. Also, it is very comforting that those hard to find, new exhibits are always backed up as I add them. A backup of everything to DVD is made about 3 or 4 times a year. I have no experience on v6 vs. v7 backup contents. I have always (except once in the old v4 days) backed up TMG data and external exhibits separately and highly recommend it. Best wishes and good luck,

Clever. Very nice! Keep those ideas coming. Thanks again, Virginia,

I do agree, completely, if you settle for the unedited TMG chart output. As you have previously mentioned, VCF makes it so easy to modify your chart to the way you want it. In the original topic under discussion, it would be quick and painless to hand-edit a chart to what is desired. Best wishes,

I rest my case, as you indicate. Recorded history began beyond 3000 years BC. Only about 2009.03 years have been recorded since BC. Recorded history can be measured by the length of the period covered, not just the number of written words that have, somehow, miraculously survived the ages from BC. No one can even guess at the volume of recorded history that has been lost. The library at Alexandria was but a small percentage of those ancient treasures destroyed. Never the less, much did survive. Do we just differ in semantics? Or...Is it your opinion that BC dates might just as well remain unsupported by TMG? I remain an avid fan of TMG. There is no harm intended in wishing that it were better. Respectfully,

Once again, I second this wish for TMG support of BC dates. As mentioned before, several of my historian and DFA genealogist friends have rejected using TMG due to this shortcomming. Most of human recorded history occurred BC. While an elegant treatment of BC is desired, something simple like negative year support would be far better than what we have. Sure, selected elapsed time calculations might be off by 1 year, but that's far better than being off by thousands. Best wishes,

Not true. TMG will give you a Warning that the sexes of both parties are the same, but there is nothing to prevent the creation of a TMG Marriage tag between two people of the same sex. You would probably want to create some custom roles and/or sentences for such a tag, but TMG will deal with this just fine. Agreed. TMG also supports a 3rd sex = unknown. You can also , obviously, have any number of multiple marriages. Any type of strange marriages can be recorded in TMG. Any, even biologically impossible, parentages are also supported. Enjoy. Best wishes,

Sorry, I can't help with the bad news. The good news...When you download a copy of TMG, you get the latest (7.04) version. No need to check for an update. Good luck,

It is assumed that you are using the standard tags...Father-Ado and Son-Ado, and the son also has a standard tag of Father-Bio. I, too, fall into that category. Only one father in the parent group can be designated as Primary at any one time. The son will only appear in the reports or charts associated with the primary Father. You can change the Primary Father designation to whichever family on which you are reporting. or As an example of what I do, I keep my bio father as primary. When I gen a descendant chart on my adoptive family, I gen. a chart on myself and copy my chart into my adoptive fathers chart, edit the composite chart as needed. In that case, I connect myself to my adoptive parents with a dotted line. In defense of this difficulty with TMG (reports and charts), it is a genealogy (biological) program, not a legalality one. Hope this helps,

My daughter, Kris (also my web expert), introduced me to a different PDF file generator. It easily works well, it’s free and installs as a printer under Windows XP. Once installed, it is automatically accessible as a printer by VCF and MSWord to generate PDF files of your TMG (output to word-processor file) reports and VCF charts. CutePDF Writer is available at: http://download.cnet.com/3001-20_4-10206470.html?spi=6d88b8aa42647edc82795a5b6938ab16 Install it in Windows XP. It will then be automatically available to MSWord and VCF as a printer. Don’t know about direct TMG printing, yet. I never print reports directly from TMG. Always print to a Word file for hand editing before printing. There are PDF paging problems with non-letter or non-legal size VCF large charts. Otherwise, you get good Charts in PDF format. The PDF-VCF charts take about half the file space of the same charts in JPG format. I always had trouble with PDF files, so have avoided using them. So far, CutePDF Writer has been trouble free, if you stay within its vs. VCF’s limitations. PDF fans, give it a try,

BTW, on the lighter side: Gender is a grammatical concept. When referring to biology, the proper word is sex. It will also get you many more hits from Google. <g> Happy New Year,

I agree that VCF should include the facility for displaying boxes with gender symbols. In 2007 Robin made available for download a collection of 6 custom frames, including some with gender symbols. The thread is here. A screenshot of the frames is below: Note that the instructions for copying the frames to TMG v7 are in message #5 in that thread. Virginia Thanks, Virginia. As you and Robin have demonstrated, it is impossible to draw a true circle or curved or non-horizontal or non-vertical lines in VCF. The smaller the drawn object, the worse it looks. What we wish for are true symbols, at printer resolution, that will vary with and be compatible with box size. For color, it should be the box border or shadow color. The box fill color is more valuable for other user desired purposes (thanks again for showing us how to easily color fill VCF boxes). Best wishes (pun intended),

I second your wish. There are many grandfathers named Marie or Anne and grandmothers named Claude or Philippe, etc. Also wish that the optional sex symbol could be a corner of the box, so that it does not use up any valuable chart real-estate. A user definable box color based on sex might also be nice, but would not help for b/w charts. Best wishes,

Merry Christmas to all genealogy fans and their relatives and friends. This e-mail Christmas card took less than 15 minutes to edit in VCF, once the content was decided upon. That includes 2 versions, one for relatives and close friends, the other with some personal details deleted. The deciding (stare and contemplate the raw TMG chart) took at least an hour. Printed, the card is 10.5 x 6.5 inches. Best wishes,

I agree with TerryR, the relationship category descriptions are accurate. I also agree with TerryD, the report is most-confusing. It is of no value to me, other than counting how many people are in a particular relative category. Strangely, descendants of the subject come at the end of the report. People within a category are often in a nonsense order. There is no way to positively tie a spouse or children to the proper persons, etc. This is especially true when multiple spouses are involved. Let's hope that WG redesigns this report with more sensible ordering and codes to positively link people to their spouses and kids to their parents. 'Til then, thumbs down on this report.

I'm not sure that I understand the reason for all this (I guess you're eliminating your mother's family), but: Are all of the parent/child relationship tags set to Primary? Any that were not primary would be skipped. Good luck,

It's not too early to plan a VCF genealogy chart to attach to family Christmas presents. A VCF chart can serve as a present to those whom you usually just send a card or e-mail, also. Family related genealogy charts are enjoyed by all and appreciated by most. Importing a few photos and adding some supporting text enhances the value of any VCF chart. The attached example chart was picked for its diverse complexity and is 8.5 x 31 inches. It is a Yours/Mine/Ours descendants chart with a line of descent thrown in. It is a composite of two standard VCF descendant charts and two ancestor charts, and took a bit over two hours to construct. Sure, you could construct it from one huge standard hourglass chart. But, a composite of multiple smaller charts is far, far easier to do. For details of the techniques involved in constructing and coloring composite charts and moving the components to where you want them, see previous posts by Virginia, Robin and me on this forum. The attached example chart is intended to show many possibilities. A chart of this complexity is not recommended for a "maiden voyage" in VCF custom editing. If you keep (or move components to fit) your charts down to letter size or legal size paper, placing one or two-back-to-back charts in transparent sheet protectors is a nice touch. You can also e-mail any reasonably sized chart (export to JPG format recommended). Best wishes,

Forgot to mention: Where space is tight, you can easily overlap and squeeze down the size of some boxes to force them to fit. You can also edit the text within the boxes and add data not supported in standard VCF chart generation.

It's the same as mine (on TMG7.04). My understanding is that if you are on the latest version of TMG, you also have the latest VCF.

After that unexpected sidetrack, this message will complete the planned topic of holiday composite charts. There are two attached letter size charts, one simple and one of medium complexity. Let’s start with a simple composite 5 generations ancestor chart, with added spouse. It will be made to fit on letter size paper (8.5 x 11 inches). See the first attachment. It is a composite of an ancestor and a descendant chart. The VCF work can be done in a minute (after a bit of practice). With the ancestor chart open in VCF, zoom-to-fit, group select the 4 oldest generations, move them left, with mouse, to overlap the subject. Then group select the oldest 3 generations, move them left until the oldest generation fits the page horizontally. You will see that connector lines cross over the subject and parents boxes. Select those boxes and click on move to front, the boxes will now cover the lines. Then, open the descendant chart, select and copy the spouse box. Return to the ancestor chart and paste the spouse, then move it to the desired location. Then import the two external pictures and trim the chart. Your minute is up. Adding explanatory text is easy, but can take as much time as you choose spend in composition. You can copy text from your TMG files and paste it into VCF text boxes. Fini. ____________________________________________________________________ The second attached chart is of medium complexity and will take the better part of an hour to do. It is basically the above chart with all siblings and their spouses added. In addition to moving the generations to overlap, you must also move boxes across generations to make room for the siblings and spouses to be copied from the descendant chart. Then import and position picture and enter explanatory text as per the simple chart, above. Now place 2 completed letter size charts of your choosing, back-to-back, in a transparent plastic sheet protector and give it to your folks. Any comments or questions? Enjoy VCF,

IE 8 Tools > Internet Options > Advanced tab > Multimedia > Enable automatic image resizing - deselect The Multimedia section is quite a way down the list so scroll down until you find it. Wow!!! So easy and worked like a champ. Big attachments look and act great, again, like on old computer. If you ever visit in New Orleans, may I take you to lunch? No expiration date on offer. Thank you so much,

Virginia - I experienced the same problem as Mike (forwhat it is worth). I am using IE 8 with Win7 so it might still be browser related - don't know. Thanks, Virginia and rlgleason51, every idea helps. I just noticed the attachment display problem this AM. I should have mentioned that I had to get a new computer, 4 months ago. I paid extra to get the latest version of XP to avoid the Vista fiasco. I use the latest xp version of the MS internet explorer as browser. I've clicked on every parameter, found, that claims to control the browser and can find no parameter that says it is associated with an automatic "zoom to fit" option. Hope someone can point me in the right direction for a fix. Or, tell me that's just the way it now is, so get over it. BTW, Virginia, the new computer, latest XP version and browser fixed the unreasonable limit on the size of attachment files that I could upload to this forum. How? It's a mystery. Thanks again for helping me to get around that in the past. Best wishes,

There seems to be a new problem with the attachment viewer for this forum (or is it me?). It displays the image, nicely, then immediately does a “zoom to fit” on the display page. An icon at the lower right of the page allows one to see the zoomed image at 200% (too small) or 400% (too big). Is there a way to defeat the new “zoom to fit” undesirable feature for attachments? The old way to view the attachment at actual size, and scroll around big attachments was great

Yes I was, thank you for the translation. Now, may I translate my previous question: Evidently, such an error is not severe, since my TMG functioned fine for years with hundreds of thousands of them. Since no more of this type error has been found on my TMG in more years, and checking for them takes up an annoying half+ of the long VFI run time, can that check be eliminated or circumvented sometime in the future? Thanks, again,

Over half the time consumed by VFI on my data is on checking for principals that are not witnesses. The time taken is very annoying. (moderate size dataset of about 83,000 persons) When this check was added a couple of years ago it found and fixed over 100,000 errors the first time it was run. Since then it has found no error. This check should be removed or made into a preferences option. Best wishes,

If there are any parents in a person's record, one and only set must be primary. TMG will allow each person to have as many parents or sets of parents as you choose. For your example, define a DUMMY set of additional parents named something like Charles* and Mary* for Gladys and make them primary. Your Charles and Mary will then automatically be assigned as non-primary by TMG. Do the same for any other problem people. A rub might come if there are many other people already in your database that also fall into the restricted area. Diplomacy is the desired cure for that one. Hope this works out for you,