Stephen Hansen

I've been using TMG since TMGv6 (1997) and have found that, for most purposes, v7 and v8 were minor upgrades. I only purchased v8 six months ago and didn't bother to actually install it for another three. I see no compelling reason to upgrade to v9 for many of the reasons mentioned in earlier posts. There's a lot of inertia involved with changing to a completely new genealogy program and I only moved to TMG when my orignial program could no longer be installed successfully to the latest version of Windows. I really don't want to move away from TMG and the last time I looked there wasn't another program that seriously tempted me to do so (although I suppose it's time to look again). My biggest concern with TMG is the lack of innovation over the past three major versions. It would be great to see Bob V. post a list of "Here's what we see as improvements in the future...". Even if there's no fixed timeline it would be a relief to know that something like a modern database is at least in the works.

Michael and Terry, Thank you for your suggestions, but leaving out all living individuals completely would kind of defeat the purpose of the web site I was uploading the data to. I had looked into using the TMG Utility to replace the given name part, but the filter options didn't appear to allow me to create a filter based on the presence or value of a TMG flag (i.e. LIVING), only on certain aspects of the various NAME tags. After staring at it for a while, I noticed the flag filter button at the bottom of the window (duh!) This was exactly what I was looking for and have been able to alter a copy of the project as I had intended. Had all of the filter options been grouped together on the page I would have noticed it earlier, but I'm guessing that it was done this way to be consistent with some of the other pages. Thank you for your help.

I have a need to upload one of my larger projects to a public site but I feel it necessary to make a reasonable attempt to protect the data of those in the project that are living, or at least not known to be deceased. When exporting the data to a GEDCOM file, TMGv7 is certainly capable of allowing me to automatically limit the tags and events for those whose LIVING flag does not have a value of "N". However, in addition I would like to alter the given name of those individuals to something like "Living" or "Withheld". Since there are over 1200 individuals in the project who don't have LIVING=N, doing this by hand is not an attractive option. Can anyone suggest a way to do this? Even adding a unique tag to individuals based on the value of the LIVING flag would allow me to throw a simple script together to filter the resulting GEDCOM file. I apologize in adavance if this has been asked and answered here before, but I couldn't find it in any of the searches I've done.

I've made a scan of the forum looking for a previous report of this error and didn't see any. My apologies if it's been reported before and I just missed it. This is a problem that I've had with both version 6 and currently with version 7, version 6 was with WinXP only, while version 7 is with both WinXP and Win7. When I've used the "copy person" feature, after a short while making any change to the copied persons will instead make the change to another person and show that person as the current one. This is a repeatable problem on my system and since it has occurred repeatedly over time, OS versions, TMG versions, and multiple computers, I don't believe that it's a problem with my installation. It has also been detected with more than one project so a corrupt database doesn't seem likely either. To reproduce the error, I would suggest taking a copy of the sample project, pick a leaf node descendant and make 3 or 4 copies. Start changing the names and birth dates or some other tag info and within a short while you will suddenly find yourself looking at a person other than the one whose tag you just attempted to modify. This bug becomes a problem when I find a new family that has a large number of children with essentially identical source and location fields. The copy feature would make the input go much easier, but I've had to learn workarounds to avoid it. Restarting TMG clears the error and allows me to continue.

Using version 7 I have created several additional flags, some of those suggested by Terry Reigel. I recently moved a number of records to a second dataset and then back again. I didn't notice it immediately, but apparently the additional flags were duplicated during each move so that in the end there were three copies of each added flag (i.e. BIRTH ORDER was not duplicated, but RELATED BY appeared three times). The surplus copies of those flags do not appear to have the values of the originals copied, they're all "?". When I tried to delete the extra copies of those flags, I was able to delete the first couple but now the flag manager generates a "Variable 'FLAG15' is not found. 373 FRMFLAGMANAGER.MOK" error. Clicking the Retry or Ignore buttons just reissues the error, Abort dismisses the error window but the flag manager remains wedged at 0% progress. The only way out is to use the task manager to shut down the application. Running the Maintenance file check didn't find any problems but a subsequent attempt to delete the extra flags ran into the same problem. I am running the 32 bit version of Windows XP Pro/ SP2 with up-to-date patches. Before I go back to my most recent backup and try to regenerate the subsequent changes can you suggest some way to get rid of those duplicate flags?