Terry Reigel

Jim, With Tag Types in the "Other Events" group, which Census Tags are, there can only be one Tag of a given type marked as Primary with each set of Principals. That is, if John Smith is the only Principal, only one Census tag can be primary. If he and his wife are Principals, only one of them can be Primary, but also one with John alone. There are two solutions. One is to make several separate Tag Types. For example, you can have a Census 1900 and Census 1910, and Census 1920, etc. For Census tags this is actually a good idea in my view, because it is easy to see at a glance which census is missing. And, you can have different Sentences for different years, which is useful especially for the early years where there is little detail. While this works well for Census, it works less well for other types of Tags, where there is little utility in having different types. So the more general solution is to not use the "Primary Tags Only" option in the report. I find this option doesn't work at all because I often have many Tags of the same type for a well-researched person. If there are certain Tags you don't want to print, assign them a different Tag Type, and use the option in the report to print "Selected" Tag Types, then un-select those Tag Types that you don't want to print. If necessary, create one or more custom Tag Types to use with data you don't want to print, or may not want to print in some cases.

Jim, Is this a Journal report, or another narrative style? (A Journal has the list of a couple's children under their section, and the others do not.) I see that the Descendant Indented narrative does offer several styles of numbering. I don't know if any of them is what you have in mind.

Toby, Sure there is. Go to the folder where you have TMG installed and double-click on TMG.chm. Make the program install? Where do you have the program installed?

Daryl, I can think of two possible issues that might cause this. One is that there is a local sentence in the individual tags that fail that need to be removed. The other is that the sentence in the Tag Type is entered in a different language than is being used in the Tags.

You're welcome, Touch.

You don't say where TMG says that, but I'm assuming you have the automatic relationship tag turned, and that's where you see this. That tag is not updated "on the go" because of performance hit it would cause to re-calculate all those relationships all the time. So it is still showing old relationships. The solution is to refresh that tag in Preferences > Current Project Options > Other. Many people who use that tag put a button to do this on the custom toolbar so it's handy.

Pretty much the same thing - edit the parent/child Relationship Tags. But if you have already disconnected the old father, it's just a tad harder. You work from either the new father's view, for from the view of each of the children: 1. To work from the father's view: note the ID# of each of the children. Then, from the father's view, add a Son-biological or Daughter-biological tag for each child, entering each child's ID# in a different Tag. 2. To work from the children's view: note the ID# of the father. Go to the view of one of the children, and at the top, and double-click where it says Father, which opens a Relationship Tag. Enter the ID# of the father. Repeat for each child. Both of these do the same thing - add a parent/child Relationship tag to connect the child and the father. The only difference is how you open that tag. You might find the article on my website about TMG basics helpful in understanding how TMG treats marriages and parent/child tags. Link below.

Touch, Make a note of the ID# of the new parent you are unable to connect. Then go to the old parent who is still connected. In the list of Tags, open the Parent/child tag for one of the children, and enter the ID# of the new parent in that Tag. Repeat for each of the other children.

You're welcome, Janice.

You're welcome, Michael. When you say "ancestor and descendant trees" you mean the box charts? There is a little on them on my website, and two chapters in Getting the Most out of The Master Genealogist. It is now available only in PDF format, on the Wholly Genes Store.

Janice, First, I would urge you not to do that. Creating separate Projects means you cannot put the people in the two in a single genealogy report, nor in a single website created with Second Site. It also means any when you customize Tag Types, Source Types, etc. you have to work to make corresponding changes in the other Project. Nevertheless, if you want to proceed, here's how. First, to be clear, you want to create two TMG Projects, one with all your ancestors, cousins, spouses, etc., and one those of your husband. Right? You didn't mention any descendants, so I'll assume there are none as I don't know which Project they are to go in. There are a couple of approaches, but I think this one will work most easily: 1. Create a temporary flag, say "Split." with values for you and your husband. I'll assume they are J and K. Enter them as K,J to make K the default. Now we change the flag for everyone in your set to J. 2. The Focus Group is the easiest method. First, make the Marriage tag between you and your husband non-primary. Then make sure the FG is empty, and add you to it. 3. Now we are going to find all your ancestors, cousins, etc. In the Add other box in the FG, check Ancestors, Descendants, and Spouses. Set the number of generations for ancestors high enough to reach the earliest, and set the one for descendants to say 5. 4. Now click the Select All button, and then the Add Others button. Repeat until the number of "Names in group" at the upper right corner of the FG screen stops getting larger. You now have all your relatives in the FG. 5. Open the List of People report, and set the "Subjects" to the current Focus Group. In Options, on the Secondary Output tab, tell it to change your Split flag to J. Run the report, and allow the program to change the flag. You now have everyone in the Project marked as J or K with the flag. 6. Now create the new Project for your relatives. Again open the List of People Report. Leave the FG as the Subject. Set the Secondary Output to create a new Project, and give it a name. Run the report and allow TMG to create the Project. 7. Finally, create the new Project for your husband's relatives. Again open the LoP report, but now make the "subjects" a Filtered Group. Create a filter of Split = Equals K. Change the name of the Project to be created in the Secondary Output to the name you want to use for his Project. Run the report and allow TMG to create the Project. You now have your original Project and two new ones.

Janice, What do you mean by "branch of a family"? All the descendants of a person? All the Ancestors of a person? All the male-line or female-line ancestors of a person? Or something else? Does it include spouses? Parents of spouses? Siblings? Depending on which you mean, you can do so with a Focus Group, by selecting people in the Project Explorer, or by use of a Filter. Once you do that the methods are a bit different depending on whether you want a new Project or to export to GEDCOM. Once we understand what you are trying to do we can offer more specific suggestions.

Michael, Yes. Use the List of Citations report. Use a filter like: Source Number = Equals [?] End You could put the actual source number in the filter, but by putting in the " [?] " code you are prompted when you run the report to enter the number, letting you use the same filter for many different sources. I find this report so useful I have added it to my custom toolbar so I can run it with a single mouse click.

Michael, TMG is designed to produce "real" narrative reports - not just birth/marriage/death in narrative followed by a bunch of bullet points, which has been traditionally the case for other programs that offer "narrative" output. A few others now have something like what TMG has had for decades, but still not as flexible. TMG does this with "Sentence Structures," often called just "Sentences," which assemble the data in the date, place, memo, and name fields together with other text and punctuation in very flexible ways. There are standard Sentences for each Tag Type, and users can modify those, or design their own Tag Types and Sentences, or modify the Sentences in individual Tags. The result is you get real narrative output, complete sentences, for all events. If you use only the defaults it gets pretty repetitious, but if you want to invest the effort you get "handwritten" text. See, for example, this page on my website for Robert Cobb. The body of the narrative there is directly from TMG. By using a couple of standard Tag Entry screens with only the standard elements instead of customizing the tag entry screen for each Tag Type, TMG lets users create unlimited numbers of Tag Types with great flexibility. The power is in the highly customizable Sentences.

You're welcome, Erik. I'm Glad it worked for you.

Erik, I think you have external exhibits, and while you have restored them to your new PC (I think) you still don't see them because the path to them is different on the new machine. You can fix that by using the exhibit repair feature in the File > Maintenance > Verify File Integrity command. See my article on Moving to a New PC for details.

While I agree that the ability to control the font size in footnotes/endnotes would be helpful, I don't think that's adequate - I also want my endnotes in double columns. I don't expect TMG to be able to do that. So I do it with a macro in Word - it sets the endnotes to double columns, adjusts the font size and the size of the continuation marks, sets the footer as I want it, as well as a few other formatting changes. There is an article on my website (link below) on how to do that, and you can even download my macro if you like what it does.

Assuming you want to move to v9, there is no need to fuss with v7 if you have a backup of your data and settings to move to the new system. You won't be able to run reports to a word process with v7 anyway, as your new system no doubt uses a 64bit version of Windows.

Doug, The only method I know for a mass delete is to move them to another data set as you have tried. I think the only solution is to find the source of the error you are getting.

Debbie, My approach to sharing with others is to send them a Journal Report as a PDF file. This avoids the many pitfalls of trying to export to GEDCOM and finding many details either do not export, or are not imported properly to other programs. Witnesses are only a small part of the issue with exporting - data encoded in Roles and Sentences, Sources that get mangled, two-person tags that do not export because they are not "family" events or because the two persons are no married or have children, and dates and citations that are omitted because GEDCOM doesn't allow them for particular tag types are examples of other issues. When you send a Journal you know what they received.

You're welcome, Kathy.

Kathy, You can of course have TMG installed on more than one device. Each license allows you to install it on up to three devices for the use of you and your family, provided that only one copy is used at a time. Synchronizing the data they use however is not simple. There are several methods, but none is effortless. If the devices will all remain connected by a local network you can put the data on one device, and access it over the network from the others. That is easy to do and avoids other issues, but doesn't work of course if you want to take a portable device elsewhere and use TMG there. You can also put the data on a removable storage device, such as an external drive or a thumb drive, and move that from device to device. That may be the most reliable method if you need to use TMG away from home, as it largely avoids the possibility of updating more than one copy of the data. The time-honored way to use TMG on multiple devices is to make a backup on the one most recently used, and then restore that backup on another device when you want to use it. In addition to being a bother to do, it is easy to forget which device has the current copy of the data and then make separate updates on two different copies. Recovering from that mistake is painful. Placing the data in folders on each device synchronized by a cloud service, such as DropBox, is not recommended and is considered dangerous to your data, because your data is actually contained on a great many individual files which are written to continuously as you work, and having a the cloud service making updates at the same time invites trouble. You can copy backups to a synchronized folder and share them that way, but do not actually make them in that folder as that is known to create corrupt backups.

Evelyn, My favorites in TMG 9: - The new "Subject" Sentence Variables which allow me to easily use first names for Witnesses, and to generate "his," "her" and other pronouns with variables without having to type them into the Sentence in separate male and female Sentences. - The ability to "Preview" Citations from the Citation Screen. It's useful in checking your work when you use the new feature to add a Source from the Citation screen, but also gives you a way to quickly see the details from a citation added long ago. For example, if I want to find the date of an old book I've cited, I don't have to go to the Source Definition screen, but can see it from the Citation screen of any Tag that cites it. - The new feature that lets me define a new Source from the Citation screen. I thought I'd not use this since I often copy existing Sources instead of typing them from scratch, but I find for some simple types of sources creating them from the Citation screen is easier. - The new "last name" Sentence Variables. In TMG 8: - The report writer can send reports to file on 64-bit systems, and shows footnotes in Screen Preview. - The ability to color code Tag labels, so I can easily find commonly used Tags like birth, marriage, census, and death, and special Tag Types I use for formatting my website in Second Site. - The addition of Role Variables to the right-click in Sentence and Memo fields, so you can enter them easily and not mis-spell them. - The ability to show both Date and Sort Date columns in the Details View. - In Tags with two Principals, you can assign one a custom Role without having the Role of the other change. - The fact that Role Variables are checked when you exit Sentence and Memo fields so you can't leave the field with a mis-spelled variable and thus get no output from that Tag. - The F3 repeat feature now works in Sentence fields. Others will no doubt have different lists, but these are the ones I find most useful.

Use the Merge Two People command on the Tools menu. If you start with one of the duplicates as focus that person will be automatically entered as one of the people to be merged. Then enter the ID of the other one, and you will see all the Tags of each displayed side-by-side. The ID# of the one on the left will be kept. That person's Tags will become Primary. All the Tags of the both people will be kept for the merged person unless you uncheck the boxes next to some of those Tags. But be careful doing that in case there are citations or details in that tag that are not in the similar tag for the other person. Better, I think, to keep all the tags and then delete duplicates one at a time after the merge so you can be sure of not losing anything important.

You can locate all the layout and toolbar files, and report definitions, etc. But the easiest way is to do a Backup on your old installation and then Restore on the new one. Do a backup of "Customizations" and at step 3 chose the items you want to transfer. Details are in my article on Moving to a New Computer or Version.