DanDennison84

and between the two, you can do a passenger list tag if you have the list.

I own both programs. I've used both for about the same amount of time. I've only been doing genealogy for a few weeks but I am an expert computer user in general. So I'm basically a genealogy newbie. Here are my impressions of both programs and just as importantly, both user groups. Legacy Advantages $20 - very cheap for a very good piece of software. Definately better than the free ones out there I tried. User Interface - slick and nice. It is very, very easy to use for newcomers. Features - It has a lot of features for $20. In fact, most of the editing features you would find in TMG. You can do sentence overrides, you can override the bibliography sentences and stuf flike that. Citation/Source/Repo Support - Fairly high end. It has easy-to-use support for various citation formats. You pick a template and fill it in. Support - There is a decent forum on genealogy.com. Reports/Charts - Decent, much better than the free stuff. You can customize a lot of stuff. The charts are nice. Navigation - Really nice, one-click lists that are useful. When on a person, I can click one button and get a clickable list of all citations for that person. It doesn't have to generate a report to do it. I can then edit from right there, either the source or citation. It has lots of coolness that way for other features as well. Disadvantages If Legacy was so good, why am I here at TMG? There are reasons related to TMG as well as some related just to Legacy. E-Mail list. The Legacy email list was REALLY off-putting. So much so that I never posted there and never visited again after spending half a day reading it. It is, quite frankly, one of the worse user lists I've ever seen for abusing people who ask honest questions when comparing products. Your post, for example, would not be received kindly. Citation/Source/Repo Support - While good, it didn't do what I wanted it to do. I made a mistake in setting up the source (an 1880 census that I setup as an 1870 census). Before I caught it, I made about 30 citations to it. I could not go back and change the source to 1880 and I could not change the citations once they were attached to a source. Now maybe there was a way, but it wasn't obvious to me. Citation/Source/Repo Support - You can't edit the template portions of a source once you use a template. You cannot customize first and following citation formats. The above reasons are why I switched initially (or at least started evaluating TMG). TMG Advantages Tag Roles - This is stuff like Witness and defining other roles for an event. In Legacy, you can't associate multiple people to one event outside the principles (for the most part). Citation/Source/Repo Support - Very, very powerful. I really like it. You can customize everything. Professionalism - TMG is really designed for the pro I think. While Legacy has surety levels, TMG has it for both principles, the date, the place and the memo field as well. So where Legacy might have a feature, TMG will have that feature at a very advanced level. User Interface - Pretty good. At first glance, it looks clunky and definately out-dated. On the other hand, it is designed for data entry and navigation. So you can see why it is done the way it is after using it for awhile. Reports - Very customizable and high end. Definately more options and more professional. Tag/Flag Support - More options and customizations. Stuff like sort dates so you can order your tags. Accents - The ability to color code different things in the tree. Legacy has this as well, but not to the degree of customization. I think you get the point by now, Legacy = Basic, easy-to-use with TMG = Advanced, more difficult to use correctly. User Support and Forums - Just great. Everyone here is incredibly helpful. There are loads of online guides and "how-to" sites for TMG. Disadvantages While reports are great, I would like to see report templates like you have sentence templates. Pricey at $80. Even more pricey when you realize you need to buy another piece to generate decent web reports. Less modern. i.e., doesn't support Unicode or 64-bit. But I believe those will eventually be addressed. Less stable. Quite frankly, I've had quite a few crashes with TMG as well as various fatal popups when generating reports. If you know what you are doing, you can get around those fatal popups, but I'm sure they would scare the bejesus out of someone less computer literate. Less easy to do simple things. i.e., you can't replicate the clickable list of source and citations for a user as you can in Legacy. You can get reports by fiddling with the report options, but it isn't the same. Summary and Overall Recommendation I do think Legacy is a great deal at $20. For a lot of people, it is going to be all they need. I think as you get into this fun field though and your projects get larger and larger, you start to need something more sophisticated. So overall, TMG is the best option if you are going to be doing this for a long time. It supports almost everything Legacy does but with more advanced options.

Hi everyone. Since everyone has been so helpful, I thought I'd post another question before I get too much further into reorganizing my tree. I'm wondering what the best practice is for the use of Witness? If I have a census, should I add the head of house as primary and everyone else in the household as witnesses? If I do that, should I also enter separate census tags for each person or not? I guess the same would apply to things like residence tags and the like. I'm unsure when to use Witness and when not to, even after reading all the guides.

Ok Terry, that is kind of what I thought, but just wanted to double-check. I've put your book on my xmas list as well =)

Hi everyone, I've tried searching for an answer to this but no luck so far. I would like to see all of the citations entered for a given person. Is there a view that does this? Right now, in Person Detail view, I'm just clicking on each tag, selecting Edit Tag and looking at the citations. I know I can get lists of all citations or all the citations for a particular source, but how about all the citations on a single person? Thanks, Dan

Thanks for the help again everyone. Doesn't sound like there is a way to do what I'm really looking for. It sounds like I can at least generate reports though which will have to be good enough.

Hi everyone, I've just started doing genealogy in the past month. I started with ancestry.com. I like the research aspects, but didn't like the tree and reporting aspects of it. So I tried Family Tree Builder and PAF since they were free. I then also purchased Legacy for $20 which I'm using now. I've been slowly trying to get to more sophisticated systems that help me organize my file system, citations and sources and reports. After I bought Legacy, a very helpful person helping me with some family research showed me some TMG reports and explained TMG to me. He had the census information tabularized in the report somehow. I've wanted to create my own census transcription for myself so I don't have to keep refering to the image and then display it in my reports. Of course, at that point, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach about the $20 I just spent on Legacy and the $70 price tag for TMG and xxx amount for ancestry.com and any other sites I want to use for research. I've also heard there is possibly a version 8 coming out. So I'm not interested in paying for TMG 7 and then again for TMG 8. I've sent an email to the support team to ask what their upgrade policy will be. So hopefully good news =) I've downloaded the evaluation version of TMG and imported my tree into it from Legacy. I've read Terry's TMG tips and read over the newsgroup archives and these boards for a few days. I've made my own sentence structures, created my own tags, played around with reports, worked hard on sources/citations, etc, etc. So with all of that said and done, I've got a few questions remaining on my evaluation and where I go from here, so hopefully some kind person can answer a few questions! MRIN I use MRIN numbers to organize my hard copies of all documents (see how it is done here). A MRIN is a marriage/family identifier much like the RIN numbers you see in TMG for an individual. The difference/rules are that a person can have more than 1 MRIN (1 per family) and unmarried children stay with the parent MRIN. So the ancestors I'm working on now, the Thomas Dennison household, has a MRIN of 5 in my filing system. His wife Ann and their 10 children share it (and each child that marries and/or remarries gets a new MRIN so you can see where the multiples come in). So the 1860 census, marriage records, land claims, etc for his household are sitting in my filing system under MRIN 5. I found one discussion on the TMG mailing list for MRIN and confess to not fully understanding it. What I've done is create a custom tag (other) called MRIN and then add the husband and wife as principles and the children as witnesses. I then put the MRIN in the memo field and have the sentence structures in the tag as "[M]" just for testing purposes now. My question is, is this best way to do it? I really want to continue to use MRIN numbers and it makes sense to me organizationally, I just need a good way to make it work in TMG. Are custom tags the way or citations or some combo? Here is what I want to be able to do in TMG with it: Add MRIN tag to husband, wife and children painlessly. Currently, I use the picklist F2 and F8 for add multiple witnesses Use the MRIN to find everyone with the same value. Currently, I have to create a filter for MRIN = 5 OR witnessed MRIN = 5. Create a hotkey or something that associates everyone in a MRIN together. I haven't figured that out yet, maybe focus groups? Control the output of the MRIN in reports. This is the one that I have the most questions about and hence my second topic. A MRIN report including each MRIN and the individuals or a report by individual and each MRIN they have. I'm sure there must be a list report I can customize for this, just haven't gotten around to it yet. Track the next available MRIN number. Legacy does this for me including renumbering. Since TMG doesn't support MRIN, I'm not hopeful, but maybe there is some kind of trick/technique to increment a counter in TMG? Tags and Reports I've read up a lot on this and I understand that the TMG reports are some of the most sophisticated around, but obviously I'm no expert. First, when I view my tag in the normal details window, is it possible to just show the memo value of 5 and nothing else for that tag? It shows up as a regular tag in the Detail panel for a person. Type, Date, Name/Place, etc. In the Name/Place, it says "Ann KEVILL (137), 5" for the MRIN tag. Is there a way to remove the wife's info and just show the 5? Next, when I do an Individual Report from the report menu, it gives me a columnar list of each tag for that individual and whatever the details are according to the sentence structure. My MRIN tag here says "Ann Kevill (137) (b. Jul 1836, d. 18 Jun 1915); 5.". Can I get the 5 which is the MRIN value to somehow show up more prominately? Like on the Subject line where it says "Thomas Dennison (138)" at the top of the report? Maybe with a "(5)" after the (138)? So I guess my question really boils down to how customizable are the reports themselves rather than the content within them? I've seen and read a lot about changing sentence structures and layout for an existing report, but can I actually change the layout of the existing report itself? Like tell it to place a TAG as a superscript on the subject line? Is there the equivalent of a sentence structure for the report itself? Thanks, Dan

Hi again! Sorry for my confusing choice of words. Reading it again it doesn't make much sense to me either =) We were discussing three different ways track MRIN: Tags, citations or as Reference numbers. So my comments were in reference to that. My point was that I didn't care about the MRIN TAG per se but more about what I need to use it for. It sounds like the TAG version of MRIN allows me much greater flexibility in putting it in reports, using it, searching on it, etc. The Reference field can also fulfill some of those needs, but does so differently. It also shows up in different places on various reports. Citations provide yet a 3rd option. So at the end of the day, it sounds like I can use MRIN in TMG and get it to mostly do what I want it to do which is the answer I was looking for =) I don't have to completely solve how to do it today as I'm probably not going to buy TMG until I hear it coming out within 3 months. I still have my evaluation version to play with. Since I got everything in Legacy and I'll have to do the MRIN stuff by hand after the import, I've got some time to try all the different ways you have suggested. So it is probably best that I try some of the suggestions, then if I have more questions they'll be more concrete and hopefully simpler to answer. This board is really great for the help you given me and I've learned a lot! Thanks so much!

Hi again everyone. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my questions and give me your opinions and answers. They were really helpful. I just got back from a weekend back at the family farm where I found a treasure trove of old photos, letters, birth certificates, land deeds and lots of other goodies. I also got about 50 photos of gravestones of various relatives but haven't checked how well they turned out yet. @Everyone - The official TMG upgrade policy is that if you purchase software and a new version comes out within 90 days of your purchase, your upgrade is free. So now I have to pick the right time and hit that window =) I'm not too worried though, it seems that the way I am doing things in Legacy will port directly to TMG when I'm ready to upgrade. @Terry - Now that I think about it, I don't really care about seeing MRIN numbers in my reports per se. What I want is it to be on my family sheets and charts and other print outs to show all the MRIN numbers associated to an individual. That just helps me when I am looking through the charts on a hard copy and want to check on a census or other record, I know where it is in my filing system. So basically, anywhere a RIN would show, all the MRIN would show too. If it isn't possible, I'll just have the tag print and I can live with that. The history tag thing was exactly the kind of advice I was looking for! @Terry - I guess my copy and paste of the link didn't work, try this one. It is the Individual Report. You pretty much answered most of my questions about reports. @GenerationGoneBy - That Tabular language sounds nifty. Is there somewhere I can learn more about it? @Michael - Those observations about filing and ID numbers are good ones. It is something I've been thinking about since I started doing this. It is also the main reason I keep migrating to more sophisticated software. I want flexibility so that I don't lock myself into something. I'm not tracking people with MRIN. What I'm doing is just using that as a file reference number to my filing system. The thing is, I want it to show up somewhere on the report and not really in the citation or bib sections. I want it there because when I'm showing my grandma a family chart or Descendency list or something like that and my mom is saying "I'm sure Great Aunt Lucile went to school in 1917 in Ida Grove" I can see Lucile's MRIN, open my file folder and pull out all the records about Lucile in about 10 seconds. I usually use simple print outs (i.e., no citations, sources, bib, etc) for family since it seems less daunting to everyone involved. At one point, I had a repo for everything. I then had broad, generic sources and then detailed citations. I also had file numbers on everything. I used the call number on the repo as the ID sometimes. As I've read more genealogies by other people and seen other discussions about how to do citations, I'm becoming more of a "detailed source, generic citation" kind of person. So now instead of having an 1860 census source, I'll have a "Thomas Dennison Household in Jefferson, Union, South Dakota" source. I then attach an image file to that source. Then each citation is just generic with no details. That way I don't get in so much trouble when I copy/paste citations around. Since citations/sources/repos can all have a file id or a call number, the system seems really flexible to me. I can now put my MRIN number there if I want as well. I also only use repos now for things that aren't broadly available like my personal files or something from a county courthouse or a church. Not that what I'm doing is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it works for me so far. But I'm always looking for ideas on better ways to do things =) I can see now I'm going to have a LOT of files to store and I don't want to get half way through them and find out my file system sucks =)