Mike Talbot

I don't know the legal ramifications, but step-relatives as described in previous post are generally accepted genealogical terms in the USA. If there is an official adoption through the U.S. court system, these do become legal terms, giving step-children the same rights and duties as bio-children. Yes, it applies to brothers, sisters, parents, etc. As a more complex example from real life, my grandma's mom died when she was an infant. Her mom's sister was married to her dad's brother. They took her in and raised her, making them her step-mother and step-father. They were also her biological aunt and uncle. Their biological children were grandma's biological 1st cousins. But by virtue of being raised together as a single household, they were also considered grandma's step-brothers and step-sisters. Hope my attempted explanation isn't too confusing,

In the USA, a step-sister relationship is one through adoption or a remarriage without the close biological sister relationship. If females have the same mother, they are sisters. The same if they have the same father but different mothers, they are sisters. One could call them half-sisters, but not step-sisters. An example of a step-sister relation, if a woman with a daughter by her previous marriage, married a man with a daughter by his previous marriage, those daughters would be step-sisters. Another example, if a couple with a daughter adopts another girl, then those two girls are step-sisters. Best wishes,

Please take note of the downside that Terry pointed out of maintaining two projects. Consider the usefulness of your data to your children and posterity. TMG is so flexible that you and your wife can share a single dataset and still maintain your own desires of how to define people or phrase reports. For example, you can define different tags for the same type of event (in the same tag group) with different emphasis and different report sentences. She uses her tag, you use yours. Only joint reports and charts (not possible with separate projects) are areas of compromise. Otherwise, her family is her way, yours is your way. Another solution of each of you maintaining a project with all of the same people in both families is error prone, frustrating and a potential source of many future arguements. If you have trouble on handling some specific item of difference in sharing a single dataset, post it here. Someone is sure to have a potential solution for your consideration. Best wishes,

Yes, I sorely miss the b.m.d. dates on the Tree display and the usefulness of the Family display in TMG4. However, I am a big fan of customizing VCF charts to my unreasonable requirements. TMG5 did fix many of the quirky crashes with v4 VCF. Otherwise, I did not like TMG5 when it came out for the above and several other reasons. It took a while before I bit the bullet and "upgraded" to TMG5. There were almost 60000 people in the database at that time. TMG v5 would corrupt my database if anyone looked at it funny. I had to resort to backups about a dozen times in just a few months of using TMG5, costing many hours work. Just when I considered another Genealogy Program, TMG6 appeared. All of the serious v5 dataset corruption problems went away. Plus no one else that had decent database features and editing, had VCF like customizable charts. I'm happy to have stayed with TMG. I customized the Person display to be almost like TMG4, long ago, and am pleased with TMG7 (still miss the Tree b.m.d. dates and a useful Family display, though). I have never had to resort to restoring a dataset backup in TMG 6 or 7, now with 82000+ people. It is recommended that you try TMG7. Give it another shot, it won't cost anything for 30 days. Many problems will disappear. Best wishes,

Michael's answer is right on target in answering your question. His suggestions are worth following. One day, you might decide that you want to also include aunts, uncles and spouses of descendants, etc. You might find that Focus Groups are more direct and easier to work than filtered lists. You can make several passes adding to your Focus Group until you have gathered a list of all of the people that you want. Just one pass is often enough. Your named Focus Group can then directly supply the list of people for your GEDCOM or a separate TMG dataset export. There are several good topics in this forum and Terry's site dealing with the details of making Focus Groups and exports. With a little experimentation, you may not need them. You can thoroughly check your exported data by importing or restoring that data into a separate TMG dataset, no matter how it was created. Good luck,

A person can have as many fathers and/or mothers as you like in their TMG record. The tags for all will all show in the standard Person Detail View. Only one father and one mother can be designated as primary at any given time. The primary designation controls which parent will appear on standard reports and charts. Word processor reports and VCF charts make it easy to customize your documents with any or all of your "parents" shown in any manner that you desire. Additional parents are easily added in TMG by clicking on the + (icon to add a tag) in the menu line at top. This will display a list of all possible tags. Mouse down, in this example, to select either Father-bio(nat) or Father-ado (I am blessed with both in my own personal record) standard tag, then fill out the pop-up form. Do the same for added mothers. You can change who is the primary mother or father at any time via the Person Detail View with the menu * icon. Hope this helps,

I was afraid that was the case. Ideally I would like to import this file into FTST to work further and improve it in FTST. I could recreate the chart in FTST but am trying to avoid having to go through that as I have many such charts. Jeff Grasping at straws, have you tried ungrouping your components in Tree Draw, then pasting them to VCF? Mike

Using latest TMG7.04-VCF under xp-home- If the last line starts with an auto-generated b., m. or d., the problem is there. If it is a continuation line, no problem. Wish WG would fix this. Good luck,

Hope it gets fixed. In the mean time, you can work around it. 1 Output report to a word processor file. 2 Insert a hard new-line/enter where ever the wrap problem occurs (or where you want it to occur). 3 Select and copy the graphics characters at the begining of the original line. 4 Paste the selected characters at the begining of the continuation line (after your hard new-line/enter) 5 If needed, rarely, once you practice, insert or delete blanks to line up the graphics characters. DONE Over 90% of the time, these reports are generated so that I can check my editing or just admire the hard work results of maintaining my data. I only fix the problems two or three times a year when I send a report to others. With practice, it usually takes less than a half-hour to fix the graphics wrap problems in a 20 page descendant report.

A possible work around for this specific case of VCF generated multi-page breaks: Try to export your large VCF chart to JPG format. This should ignore the VCF page breaks and produce one continuous JPG chart image (hopefully your big chart is within JPG format size limitations). My test case was a 1 x 8 feet chart. This was performed using XP and VCF 7.04. I don't have Vista or a wide carriage printer to truly complete the test. Some service companies can print out large JPG files. Glad I paid extra to get XP on my new computer, instead of Vista. Vista is reputed to have many other upward compatibility problems. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Virginia Blakelock started 3 interesting topics on this forum, during the Spring. See the archives for her posts on: 1. How to color fill VCF chart boxes. 2. Use "tiny charts", when great detail is not required, in order to fit more people on a chart page. 3. How to create multiple named definitions of each chart type's parameters in TMG. This allows you to completely change the parameters and appearance of a generated chart with just a couple of mouse clicks. For example, the attached chart shows 3 generations of descendants on a standard sheet of legal size paper using these 3 features. Mike

PS: Forgot to mention, you can edit data inside of the boxes. When you find a spelling or date error, just fix it (don't forget to fix your TMG data, also). You never have to generate an amended chart from scratch, unless you really want to. Mike

I agree with Terry's remarks. There are several good threads in this forum on the details of how to customize and color your charts using VCF. Doing so requires practice and a little patience, but the results can be well worth the effort. You can copy and paste boxes from other charts on to the chart that you are working. This is handy when you have a chart that you've put a lot of work into editing and you later find that a person or so is missing. Always remember that you can select several components and move them, delete them, copy and paste them or color them as a group. Attached is a chart similar to the one that you questioned that fits on letter size paper. It has been augmented a bit from just a plain 2 gen. descendant chart to illustrate a few items that might inspire creativity. The total VCF hand editing time to make this chart was about 15 minutes. There are many more examples of VCF custom edited TMG charts at website: http://mwtalbotandassoc.design.officelive.com/default.aspx Good luck and best wishes, Mike Talbot

I agree. This feature has long been on my wish list. Even if the BC support just consisted of allowing negative dates, it would be a huge improvement over what we have now (I know, there was no year zero). Perhaps Wholly Genes is evaluating their support of BC dates based on the few who have expressed a wish for this capability. Instead, they should be looking at the potential customers who have rejected buying TMG due to this glaring weakness. Those lost sales do not post on this forum. Consider, most of the dates in history are BC (There are a lot of historians with bugets out there). I know of 2 such lost sales. If I know 2, there must be hundreds or more. Best wishes (pun intended), Mike Talbot

Sorry, I can't answer your question. Copy and paste was my way. But, may I share a lesson from "The School of Hard Knocks" with you? Web sites frequently come and go. Even when a web site does not die or go unmaintained, the URL might change. When none of those bad thngs occur, the web page that your data was on within that site, may change. You can be sure of only one thing with web links/URLs of data. After a few months or years, a large percentage of web addresses or the data therein will change. Consider, crediting the person that dispayed the data by name and date, by his given reference or both. You can probably come up with an alternative that suits your needs, better. But do rest assured, many, many web links are temporary and fleeting. Here today, gone tomorrow. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Just do a few images at first, and generate test VCF charts until you make sure that you're pleased with the results. Once satisfied with your choice of TMG chart configuration, image size and resolution, you can then do the rest. Mike

A possibility: Make a TMG backup on your old computer. Attach the resulting *. SQZ TMG backup file to e-mail and send it to yourself. You can then TMG restore the .SQZ file to TMG on your new computer. Warning, Get TMG 7 for your new computer. TMG 5 was toxic-ware. I had TMG files corrupted about a dozen times during the few months that I used TMG 5. This cost many hours of needless work. Corrupted TMG fiiles have never happened to me using TMG 4, 6 or 7, over almost a decade. Best wishes, Mike Talbot

My typical image is about 124 x 180 pixles or so, at around 100 dpi. Some are bigger a few smaller. I usually crop just the face from a photograph or portrait as a TMG/VCF external image and save the original picture elsewhere, like a DVD or flash drive. I never use TMG internal images for ease of backup reasons. My computer memory size is 2.5 gigs and I've never had a memory problem with VCF, even on very large charts. I do a lot of copying and pasting from other charts. VCF displays all images at 96 dpi, so any finer resolution is wasted. Wow! 1200 x 1800 x 300 dpi is huge!!! Remember there is another size multiplyer of 16 to 24 color bits. I don't know the optimum, but you should reduce your images by around an order of magnitude in each direction. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Have you defraged your hard-drive, lately? With so many random accesss disk files, so frequently edited, TMG would be more prone to file fragmentation and resulting slow downs than most other programs. File fragmentation slow down would be particularly noticable on startup, backup, VFI, optimize, if that is a part of your problem. Perhaps, use DEFRAG evey week or two, if you do a lot of TMG editing. Hope this helps, Mike Talbot

Thank you, Virginia and Robin, for providing a lot of insight into the peculiar behavior of some VCF connector lines. The 5/16 inch spacing rule was a particular revelation and does explain a lot of connector line misbehavior. As a pragmatist, the important thing is to get smooth right-angled lines that you want onto your chart where you want them. It is preferred that connector lines actually connect boxes at the desired points. As you have both shown, that is not always practical. A work around, when severe VCF connector misbehavior is encountered, is to not actually connect boxes, but partially hide connector line end points behind boxes. To accomplish this, copy and paste an existing VCF connector line onto your canvas (you can’t draw a connector from scratch without port end points, I haven’t tried incorporating free-floating port points yet). Move the copied-line to approximately where you want it. The line will assume a sideways Z shape when moved. Manipulate and shape the line by dragging its inflection points to your exact desired shape and positions. With the line still selected, click the “back” menu icon (two gray squares partially covering a yellow square). Those portions of the line overlapping boxes will now be hidden behind those boxes. The boxes will not be truly connected, but will appear to be so on your chart. A caveat, if you later move the line, it will reassume a sideways Z shape. So, insert these line types last. But, it is easy to reshape it to what you had before the move. Check your chart carefully, if you must move components after the “partially hidden” line was completed. Sometimes, you will find that a single shape-manipulated connector line can pseudo-connect several boxes with this “partially hidden” line technique. To plagiarize Virginia, I am an avid VCF fan, not an expert. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Love what everyone has done on this topic. I wanted to respond to this interesting message, sooner, but was neck deep in another project. In the family group selected for this example, Henry Watkins is also the brother-in-law of some of his children and the uncle of some of his grandchildren. One genealogical charting guideline had to be violated. Amelie Gounin’s second marriage and offspring had to be placed before those her first marriage to avoid confusing connector line crossovers. The attached chart is similar to other “Yours, mine and ours” charts, and uses right to left orientation. It fits on an 8.5 x 22 inch sheet. It took about an hour to make. Far more time was spent writing this procedure amd explanation than doing the VCF work. It is much easier for me to generate two VCF charts, one for the “yours” and another for the “mine” descendants. An added advantage of this approach is not having to mess in your database and maybe remembering to fix it. Copy and paste components from one VCF chart to another is sooo easy in VCF. You can sort of control where the pasted components will go by preselecting a component near the desired location in the destination VCF chart. Deal with each of the two charts separately. For each chart, zoom to fit, group select (procedure defined in many places in this forum) and move the components closer together to save space. Spouses are group selected and moved up to touch the descendant boxes and those annoying and confusing lines connecting descendants to their spouses were group selected and deleted. Do most of your moves with counted jog (arrow) keys. The appropriate components from the “mine” chart then were group selected, copied to the “yours” chart and moved to the appropriate spot, forming the desired “Yours, mine and ours” chart. It is important to maintain a little of the horizontal offset of descendants from spouses for group selecting all descendants within generations for applying color accents. The offset will also come in handy should you ever desire to modify parts of the chart. The color accents, using Virginia’s color palette and technique, were then applied to distinguish the “yours” from the “mine” from the “ours” descendants (blue and yellow make green logic). Again group selections were made, so that each color had to be applied only once (yes, you can combine multiple group selections for a single operation). Virginia’s color palette boxes were left in place and text was added to define the meaning of each color accent. The color accents are so important in making the chart easier to read. In using group selections, don’t worry about getting some lines, points and text when only boxes are desired. All those other components are immune to most box operations that you will need (thankfully, except for moves) and vs.vs. We could declare ourselves finished at this point, but to guild the lily, an ancestry chart was generated for Amelie Gounin. Those in her line of ascent through Am. Rev. War vets to a Micmaque Indian in Acadia were singly selected, while holding down the shift key. These components were copied and pasted to our final chart. The boxes were moved individually to form a line of descent and then color accented to Amelie Gounin’s color. Connector lines were added to the line of descent as a final step. The lines don’t actually connect the boxes, but parts of them are hidden behind the boxes, making it appear that the boxes are connected. VCF connector lines sometimes appear to have a mind of their own, so this partially hidden line technique can save you a lot of grief. Best wishes, Mike Talbot

New and growing (that's the plan, anyway). URL: http://mwtalbotandassoc.design.officelive.com/default.aspx Focus will be on Louisiana families and historical personages. A few of the many surnames included: Talbot, Gauthe, Gouner, Odenwald, Timothy, Patton, etc. Come up and see me sometime, Mike Talbot

Thank you. Sophia is my favorite celebrity, too. There are about 50 web pages at the site now, an order of magnitude more stuff than on 11 Feb. Lots more celebrities, nobility/royalty and just folks charts (about 100) are there now. Please consider a revisit. Mike Talbot http://mwtalbotandassoc.design.officelive.com/default.aspx

Environment: Pentium 4, 34 megaHz windows xp home main memory: 2.5 gigs spare disk space: 170 gigs Attempt to upload 880KB JPG file. Find file with browse Click upload button progress blue bar graf moves slowly to about 35%, it then rapidly moves to 100% and is then replace with the word "done". Meanwhile in the middle of the screen, above the word "Uploading...", a wheel is spinning. The wheel keeps spinning perpetually, until the upload is manually killed. Other attempts: Copied the file to the C: root directory. Upload attempt failed same way Attempt to Upload a 300KB JPG file that was successfully uploaded a little over a week ago, failed in the same manner. Rebooted, re-attempted all of the above uploads. All failed same way. Any Ideas? Help!!! BTW, I like the new RTF editor for text, Mike Talbot

Thanks, Jim. But that is definitely not the case. I can upload files to the forum of under 300 Kbytes via AOL, directly, with no problem. Using the MS Internet Explorer, I can upload files of almost 500 Kbytes with no problem. I have never been able to upload a single file larger than about 490 Kbytes to this forum. I have uploaded smaller files totalling way more that 500 Kb since this problem was first detected. The problem is definitely any single large file and definitely not the sum of files to date. Virginia was able to upload a file of almost a meg under my name. It is my computer or my browsers or a protocol incompatibility. Best wishes, Mike Talbot