ChristelleJvR

Michael, Thanks for your suggestion. You are correct, the DeVilliers system is very similar to the Modified Henry: Modified Henry 1. Progenitor 11. Child 111. Grandchild 1111. Great-grandchild 1112. Great-grandchild 112. Grandchild 12. Child 121. Grandchild 1211. Great-grandchild 1212. Great-grandchild DeVilliers a1. Progenitor a1b1. Child a1b1c1. Grandchild a1b1c1d1. Great-grandchild a1b1c1d2. Great-grandchild a1b1c2. Grandchild a1b2. Child a1b2c1. Grandchild a1b2c1d1. Great-grandchild a1b2c1d2. Great-grandchild There is however a problem with using the macro as you suggest, in that it will fall over when an individual has more than 9 children (and I have a quite a few families like that). Then simply inserting a letter before the digit will not work. I was wondering whether it is possible to use the birth order and some flags to generate the number (and be able to regenerate it) in TMG. Unfortunately there has not been a lot of research done on some of the families that I work on, which means that these numbers change quite often as I discover additional children, or even add or remove generations (they were very economical with adding new names into the tree, rather used a limited set of names over and over...). Any suggestions? Christelle

Can anybody recommend a way for me to generate a descendent report based on the DeVilliers numbering scheme? This numbering scheme is almost exclusively used in South Africa. It can be described as follows: '------------------ The original ancestor you start numbering from is a. Every subsequent generation takes the following generation letter, so the children of "a" are designated with "b," the grand children of "a" are "c," and so on. Each child is given a number - the oldest is 1, the second 2, and so on. Thus, the children of a are: b1 b2 b3 etc. Their descendants are: b1 c1 c2 d1 c3 d1 d2 b2 c1 c2 and so on. Thus the third child of the second child is a.b2.c3. '------------------ At the moment, the only way for me to generate reports such as these, is to import the data into Legacy (which supports this numbering system) and generate the report. However, since Legacy does not use witnesses and roles, some of the data do not transfer properly, which means my reports are not as complete as they would be if I generated them from TMG. To publish any genealogical report in South Africa, it needs to be in this notation to be understood by most (any?) family researchers. It is also the best way to compare my research with other work done on the same families. I do not want to manually code the entire DeVilliers code for each person in the "Reference" field, because that will have to be manually maintained, which will turn out to be a nightmare. I do not want to move my main database to Legacy, since I have loads of information contained in witness statements, and I use the valid date range for locations extensively. Legacy does US county verification, but I only have one US address in my entire database... I would appreciate any help. Regards, Christelle Jansen van Rensburg (edited for spelling)

Thanks so much for these replies. I think I will go with "Surname, Unnamed" or "Surname, Unnamed (Boy)" and its variants as well. Does anybody have good custom sentences for the birth and death tags of these children to share? Christelle

According to family records (a beautiful handwritten family tree by my great-grandmother), my great-grandparents had two children that both died a couple of days (1 day and 2 days for the other) after they where born. I have the dates, as well as full funeral information (witnesses, dates, etc) for these babies. They are however only listed as "seun, sterf ongedoop" which translates as "son, died without being named (christened)". What would be the best way to add these babies to my records? I do not want to give them no names, because that is how I treat people where I do not know who they were (or have only a surname), and I want those to show as "unknown" in my database. But I know these babies were not given names, so they are not "unknown". I am sure my family can't be unique... Thanks in advance for any help. Christelle

Thanks! The language on the one was set to English UK and the other to English US. I cannot remember ever changing that. Is there any way to change the language for all tags and reports and lists and whatever to a given language, without doing it one by one? Again, thanks for your help.

I've created a number of custom tags by copying existing tags and then modifying the sentences. For example, I created a "Moved" tag by copying and renaming the Immigration tag, and replacing the "immigrated to" to "moved to". I also added a "MovedWith" role for the children of the parents. I also modified some local sentences by adding [+] to combine it with the previous sentence. However, when I generate the Individual Narrative report, the original sentences are used. The "Moved" sentences appear, but reads "immigrated to", my "Cremated" tag still reads "buried" and the combined sentences still appear as separate sentences. I can for the life of me not figure out what I'm doing wrong. Are there any settings I should enable? Since I changed the sentences, why are the old sentences still being used? Please help me fix this. Thanks, Christelle Jansen van Rensburg