Mike Talbot

I have some similar names and have not had this problem with VCF charts. I do have that problem, among many others, with the Relationship Chart (it does not deserve the dignity of the name chart). Tedious hand editing in a word processor is the only fix. Hopefully, one day, TMG will output the Relationship Chart to VCF. Where I do have a problem with VCF long names, is when a word in the name is longer than the available box width. This drives VCF nuts and the results are unpredictable in that box. For example, my old genealogy program had a fixed length name field, so I would have to compress out the blanks to make the name fit (ie: "von Immenstein zu Oberfels" became something like "v.Immenstein-Oberfels"). Over a decade ago, when I converted to TMG, I had to hand insert the original spelling in TMG for VCF charts to be functional. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Dear Joan: I agree with Terry. It is recommended that you follow both of his suggestions. Merge your datasets. There is absolutely no advantage to working in more than one dataset. There are very many, many disadvantages, like the one you're facing now. Keep all of your genealogy eggs in one basket. Separate datasets are useful when someone sends you their database, which you should keep separate from your own work. When you find a small amount of data useful to you, type it into your dataset. If you find a large segment of their data to be useful, make a subset, check it, and then merge it into your single working dataset. Another use for a separate dataset is when you desire to make and check a subset of your data to send to someone else. Learn to make composite VCF charts, move boxes, draw lines and import images in the VCF charts. You will be able to make displays that you haven't even imagined, yet. It is also lots of fun. As a simple example: Many people like 5 generation ancestor charts (Seize Quartiers). Drawn in a reasonable scale, these will not fit on 8.5 x 11 inch paper as generated by TMG. With a couple of selections and moves, you can overlap the first two generations and make them fit on standard letter size paper. Once you have practiced, it is the work of a minute. Good luck and best wishes, Mike Talbot

Once you become familiar with TMG, you will find that you never, ever need to know an ID Number. Think of it as auxilliary computerese showing the lat/long of where the data resides. When an ID Number could be used in TMG, you will see a camera icon next to that field. Click on the camera icon to bring up the Picklist window (an alphabetical index of all people in your dataset). Start typing the person's name (usually, last name first, unless you redifine the picklist) and the picklist will reposition itself with each letter typed. Double click on the desired person's name in the Picklist and you're done. The values of the desired numbers that you indicate will be automatically generated and appear in an Ahnentafel Report of yourself, but will not be saved into your database. Best wishes and welcome to TMG, Mike Talbot

Thanks Virginia. All the image files are in the same location: G:\TMG_Images . I can't imagine that's the problem. Also, it's not a generational thing either. For example: As previously mentioned, I can't produce a report with images for one of my great grandparents. Then, of their 4 children (including my grandmother) I can produce descendancy reports for two of them. MOST confusing. Regards and thanks VCF is the major reason that I'm an avid TMG fan. I have had no problems with TMG6 or TMG7 VCF charts. I did have trouble with TMG5-VCF, but learned it was a memory thing. When I upgraded to half a gig, the VCF problems went away. I'm still running with half-gig and Windows XP home. To grasp at straws, what format are your troublesome exhibits? All of mine are JPG with a few in BMP. All 10,000+ TMG associated exhibits reside in C:\tmgex. My C drive has 170 spare Gigs. (a thinner straw) Does the VCF ancestor or hourglass chart work with your same troublesome people? Good luck and best wishes, Mike Talbot Gidday Mike All my exhibits are JPEGs - created in PhotoShop. My computer has heaps of resources: 2 G RAM and plenty of disc space. I've just worked through 4 generations - starting with me, then my mother, grandmother, her brother and my great grandfather. Tabulated results are here: http://klem.site.net.au/TMG_Box_Chart_Results.html Note that I can create ancestry charts (with images) across all generations, but when I inject descendants. either as a straight descendancy chart or an hourglass chart, VCF falls over. So the same images in some reports won't apparently work in other reports. Also, note that reports for my grandmother don't work, but her brother's do! Any suggestions gratefully received! Regards I use Corel Photo-Paint for most of my JPG image preparation, I don't think that this is relevent, but who knows? You are homing in on what is not your problem. It is not a program (other than one not protecting itself from bad data). I agree with Terry, the only obvious thing left is that TMG/VCF does not like one or more of your individual primary image files, perhaps corrupt. You have proved that the images of all of your ancestors are good, and that the descendants of one g.uncle are good. The bad primary image(s) must be of a different aunt/uncle or their descendant(s) or your sibling or descendant. My sugestion, make all of your suspect relatives, aunts, uncles images "not primary" except for the g.uncle and his descendants that work. Run the offending VCF chart and add back your relatives one at a time, until the chart fails. Replace the suspected bad image with a new and different one. If the image is corrupted, relinking it won't help. Rerun the chart. You know your data better than I, so you might be able to devise a bad image detection procedure that is less work. Since you describe two different manners of failure, you might have more than one bad primary image, if that is the problem. Hope this works, if not keep posting your good observations, someone will stumble on the answer, Mike Talbot

Thanks Virginia. All the image files are in the same location: G:\TMG_Images . I can't imagine that's the problem. Also, it's not a generational thing either. For example: As previously mentioned, I can't produce a report with images for one of my great grandparents. Then, of their 4 children (including my grandmother) I can produce descendancy reports for two of them. MOST confusing. Regards and thanks VCF is the major reason that I'm an avid TMG fan. I have had no problems with TMG6 or TMG7 VCF charts. I did have trouble with TMG5-VCF, but learned it was a memory thing. When I upgraded to half a gig, the VCF problems went away. I'm still running with half-gig and Windows XP home. To grasp at straws, what format are your troublesome exhibits? All of mine are JPG with a few in BMP. All 10,000+ TMG associated exhibits reside in C:\tmgex. My C drive has 170 spare Gigs. (a thinner straw) Does the VCF ancestor or hourglass chart work with your same troublesome people? Good luck and best wishes, Mike Talbot

Reran the test with output to the "print preview". The result on screen was perfect and agreed with the MSWord version on disc file (except the screen preview was prettier). The focus person was newly entered into TMG 7.0 as were about 10 % of the ancestors. Several of "the converted from 6.12" ancestors had been edited in 7.0. The only difference, I can see, is that I had no errors on the restoration (conversion) of the 6.12 backup to 7.0. My copy of the 7.0 program was downloaded from the TMG website about a week after the anouncement. I'm out of ideas. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Compressed pedigree works fine for me on both starting subjects converted from 6.12 and starting with new people entered in 7.0. All my tests were output to MSWord 2000 files. My dataset has about 80,000 people, if that is meaningful for you. Tests run on 3.4 GHz Pentium 4, half-GigaByte memory, Windows XP Home. I have kept 6.12, but only use it for verifiction purposes, when something on 7.0 looks strange. I have found no conversion problems, so far. In 6.12, I had a lot of trouble with compressed pedigree reports output to Adobe PDF files. I don't do that, anymore. Let me know of your options, if you would like for me to run more tests. Good luck, Mike Talbot

Just a thought based on what I do. Merge your two datasets into one. I can see absolutely no advantage in keeping them as separate datasets. Once they are merged, the feature that you want is there, plus many others. When you find a family connection, you are ready to make the links. Reports, charts and the (auto) relationship calculator will tell you all you want to know about who is a proven relative and who is not. Separate projects and datasets are of value when you acquire and want to keep a relative, authority or friend's database for reference (and plagiaristic <g>) purposes. Best wishes, Mike Talbot

My dataset has about 80000 people and 10000 pictures, dozens of them are group photos. It seems to be almost a matter of semantics whether a single photo is linked to multiple people or whether multiple people link to a single photo, as far as genealogy is concerned. I find the current methods in TMG for handling group pics adequate for my purpose. Perhaps, this is because my only goal is organizing genealogy and does not include the organizing of a photo album. The new hilite layer and limited photo editing ability in TMG, has given new desirarable power to showing group photos with different hiliting for each individual in the photo. Best wishes, Mike Talbot

Just a few guesses. If it is not one of the following, then I'm out of ideas. 1. You say there is evidence of a problem in your V6 dataset. Have you done the V6 file maintenence functions- VFI and Optimize until there are no errors detected, then generate your V6 dataset Backup? 2. Did you restart your operating system (Windows/Vista?) after successfully installing V7 and before restoring your Backup? 3. Did you delete the bad V7 dataset before trying to restore a new one? (this is grabbing at straws, but couldn't hurt) Good luck, Mike Talbot

Yes, I did this on TMG 6, the necessary pop-up is still there on 7.0 VFI. 1 Move your exhibits to new folder 2 File>Maintenance>VFI, pop-up specify folders to search (specify your new exhibit folder) 3 done, all exhibits will be acessed from your new folder 4 As soon as convenient, File>Preferences>...set new default exhibit default folder, for consistancy Good luck, Mike Talbot

The right hand side of the Details window wastes a large area of valuable display real estate on just 4 buttons. That space is sorely needed, as always, for TAG lines with long memos or note tags. I restored the tiny ADD, DELETE and PRIMARY icons to unused space in the menu line, where they were in the previous version. The EDIT button is totally unneeded (it's much easier to double click on what you want to edit). How can the ADD, EDIT, DELETE and PRIMARY buttons on the right side be removed and that space recovered for long TAG data? Brst wishes. Mike Talbot

The curved arrow in the menu says it returns you to the "last viewed person", it does not. It actually returns you to the "last viewed view", maybe the same person. That is useless. The VIEW menu feature formerly showed the last "10 (often inadequate, but better than now) viewed people". It now shows the last "10 people-views", this may be as low as 4 or 5 people (always inadequate). It is so easy to get to the desired view, but almost impossible to remember the previous people edited. Is there a way to get back to the TMG 4 through 6 tactic of last person and last 10 people, ignoring which view??? Best wishes, Mike Talbot

Thank you. That works. I missed it when browsing preferences. Now if only we could get the length of the "view history" retuned to user defined (TMG 4) or at least 20, nirvana would descend upon this feature. Best wishes, Mike Talbot

Thanks, it worked, Mike Talbot

As Charlie Tuna would say..."Do you want a tuna with good taste or tuna that tastes good?" Give me "tastes good", any day, Mike Talbot

Generation breaks occur at very specific places. The break has nothing to do with any occupant of any generation. Breaks occur following persons with ahnentafel numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16...2**n in an ancestry. A specific person may appear multiple times in a single ancestral generation and also might be a member of multiple generations in a single ancestry. If you know more than about a dozen generations of a person's ancestry, it is highly likely that you will encounter this phenomenon. Three of my grandparents were distant cousins. I'm my own 5th, 6th, 7th, etc. cousin several times over. Some individual ancestors are members of as many as 4 different generations. I think that you were kidding, maybe, cheers, Mike Talbot

The Beesoft utility program PATHWIZ addresses this issue, see: http://www.sceya.com.au/pathwiz/ Good luck, Mike Talbot

I have not had this exact problem, but have had other wierd problems associated with a particular person. The only fix was to document and delete that person (in your case 528). Then redefine the person from scratch. Hint: If you have any loooong memos, copy them to a word processor before deletion. Wish I'd have thought of that sooner! Hope this helps, Mike Malbot

TMG tells one that it cannot find VCF (with both hands) and that TMG must be reinstalled from CD. The error message occurs the next (and all subsequent) VCF oriented chart report generation attempts after the user changes a file name of any image (in any image window via that image's preferences). The error used to also occur if the user attempted generating a VCF chart and had exited VCF without saving the previously generated chart. But that seems so be fixed. Temporary work-around: exit TMG and re-execute TMG. Assuming that you haven't had a heart attack. Mike

You only need to separate questions if the question description is very, very complex or totally unrelated. All of your questions involve data entry. 1. I would enter Fulton Co. or if I were a better typist, Fulton County, in the county field. 2, In a Descendant Chart, the marriage date is always in the spouse's box (reason, a descendant can have multiple spouses). Ancestor Chart, the marriage date is in the father box (coin flip, mom lost). 3. There is a sort date for every date field. It is invisible on reports but controls the order in which events are displayed. Since it does not appear on reports, you can make up any number for sort order. Don't use the beginner's edit option. It is no simpler, anyway. Best wishes, Mike Talbot

The lady is unhappy. Therefore, hand editing that one person's data on any output to anything she desires can possibly achieve happiness for her. No need to change the way genealogy works. Maybe, Mike

Leave your dataset with the wrong sex person. Output reports to your word processor. Output charts to VCF. You may now hand-edit that one person with the wrong sex anyway that you want before printing. Good luck, Mike Talbot

An editing history file for TMG is a good idea, now that file space is so cheap. To see an on-line, dynamic genealogy database with a good "history of updates" to model from, go to: http://geneweb.inria.fr/roglo?lang=en No comment on setting flags when entering people with no dates. Without any dates, what is obvious? Estimating birth years has been discussed in this forum recently (you can estimate a birth year and add a following "?" to show that the date is made-up and not true data). Best wishes, Mike Talbot

Can't copy all of my TMG exhibit Files to a flash drive. Problem is associated with long file names. Environment: 3.4 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 500 MB main memory 250 GB hard disk (180 GB spare) 2 GB Toshiba USB2 Flash Drive TMG exhibits files total size, 0.65 GB MS Windows XP home (up to date) Well, I finally broke down and bought a flash drive. Every one of many tests that I ran, worked perfectly. Then the real world happened. The purpose for which the flash drive was purchased was to back up my TMG exhibit files from a single hard drive folder. Procedure- Using Windows Explorer window> select all from source HD folder window> drag and drop to destination flash drive root folder window. The copy started working fine until it got to the 179th file, the copy stopped with the following message - Error copying file or folder Cannot copy insertAnyLongFileName: The directory or file cannot be created. This message terminates the copy, with no retry option. The 178 files copied to the flash drive are perfect, most have long file names. If I try to add another file with a name longer than 10 characters, the same error message appears and no copy is performed. Adding more files with short file names works perfectly. Shortening my file names is not an option. I have about 10,000 TMG exhibit files (total size 650 megs), most with long names. All are JPG (with a few BMP) format files plus two SQZ files. The two SQZ files (about 180 megs, each), with long names, copied fine. I can add more SQZ files if I shorten the name, the standard long file name SQZ files fail to copy with the same error message. I have used this same drag and drop method, successfully, on the same 10,000 files before. 1. Copy from a CD or DVD to a hard drive folder. 2. Copy the same files from one hard drive folder to another. The problem has been confined to copying to a flash drive. It has had nothing to do with the number of files copied or their size, but only the number with file names longer than 10. Are we back to DOS similar restrictions with flash drives? Can anyone help? Is there a work around or different copy procedure to try? Thanks, Mike Talbot