Terry Reigel

Kim, It doesn't matter a bit where they are on the screen. TMG can't see the PAF screen. Where are they in File? That's the only think the import process sees. What do you see when you look at the PAF or GEDCOM file you imported? NotePad will let you look at a GEDCOM file, and I suspect also the PAF file, though I don't think I've ever looked at one.

I expect it processes the events in the order they are found in the file being imported. Was this project imported from GEDCOM or directly from the original file, by GenBridge? I don't think there is any program feature that makes SealParent "override" Christening. When there are multiple tags in the Birth group being imported, in general TMG has no way to know which is supposed to be primary. In this case a human would know that SealParent shouldn't be, but there can be any number of Birth group tags, including any number of Birth Tags. So the program doesn't try to evaluate the merit of one over the others, but uses a simple rule, which I believe is to make the first one found Primary, for lack of any better information. I think that's what happened here - simply the result of the way the data was arranged on the imported file.

Kim, They may have been entered first in the original program, but it would appear that on import the SealParent tags were processed first, and thus "entered" first in TMG. Not knowing the details of the import process I can't say why. I have no idea why they are in those groups. You're welcome, Kim.

Actually, TMG makes the first Tag entered in the Birth Group primary - there is nothing special about the SealParent Tag. It doesn't give either priority. It uses the Tag in the Birth Group that is marked as primary, which should be the first one entered. You can solve the problem of the SealParent Tag being in the Birth Group and being primary. Create an alternate SealParent tag in the Other events group (with a slightly different name). Use the TMG Utility to change all the old SealParent tags to your new tag type. You can change the name of the standard SealParent tag type to something else if you want to avoid confusion. However this will leave you with no primary Birth Group Tag for those people - removing the Primary Tag does not automatically make another Tag primary. So I'm not sure this helps you much.

John, No, it never asks. Removing the old program itself doesn't really make any difference - that doesn't delete any of your data. However, if you should decide the data files used for TMG8 are no longer needed and delete them before you figure out the exhibits there are still the active ones you would have a problem.

John, You didn't overwrite any defaults. The "defaults" are just that - default values for new Projects you created. They have nothing to do with existing Projects. When you move an existing Project to a new version of TMG the paths set in it are left intact. That's the whole reason for having paths in the project, so each project can have it's own paths and you can keep everything separate for different Projects if you want. Your Project now in TMG 9 is using the old exhibit paths because of one or more of the following: You never moved the exhibit files to a new location. You never told TMG to find the existing files in their new location. You never told TMG to put new exhibits in the new location. Only this last is accomplished by changing the path in Preferences > Current Project Options > Advanced. See may article on Moving Data to New Computer or Version for details on how to do all three. In my opinion putting exhibit files in the default location, under a version-specific folder, is a poor choice. If they had been placed in a "version-neutral" location you wouldn't need to deal with this in the course of an upgrade. BTW, you should check the other paths, not just the one for exhibits, because they too will remain as before, which may not be what you want if you have used the default locations for them.

My solution to this issue is to create three separate Roles for the head of family. I use the Principal Role (you could substitute your Head of Family Role) when there are multiple children which says "...children...were..." Then I have separate Roles for one son and one daughter, which say "...son...was..." and "...daughter...was..." I don't know of a way to make this work in a single Sentence.

And us US-centric types don't even know what those symbols mean when we see them, perhaps because different symbols are used in different countries?

Dave, I have 128,000 citations to 4500 sources, and don't see any performance issues. Maybe you have many more Sources? I suspect that if they came from your Ancestry tree each Source that's cited multiple times, like census, appears as a separate Source in TMG. If every citation creates a separate Source I can see that the MSL would be a problem. You can find the people linked to a Place entry in TMG by selecting that Place and clicking the Events button. That produces a list of event tags using that Place with the Principal(s) listed.

Brian, I've responded to your post with the same questions on TMG List.

Dave, With TMG and Second Site you have two ways available to create links to sources. One is to save an image of it and attach it as an exhibit in TMG. Second Site will then let you include that image in the site. The beauty of that approach is it works for any source you can find as an image or can scan or photograph. On the other hand with 180,000 citations doing this is a huge task. The other approach is to include the URL to online sources, and properly done Second Site will make that a link in your site. This works well for links to the main page of a site like Ancestry, but since many such sites revise their structure from time to time links to individual source images are more problematic. Because of that I provide URLs only to the "front page" and try to provide enough information about the source itself in the citation that a reader can find it.

Thanks, Dave, From this I gather you can't do this on the Ancestry website, but have to do it in FTM then upload from there. I don't know that I want to get FTM just to do that.

Dave, Could you tell me how you did that? I've not been able to figure it out.

Tom, I'd "expect" them to recognize those citations to Ancestry sources because failure to do so renders the hints to Ancestry sources basically useless. That's really the reason I mention this issue. Realistically, Ancestry's process for accepting trees from GEDCOM is seriously flawed, and is clearly not a priority in their development effort. As you point out, recognizing the citations to Ancestry sources is hard, and they don't even do easy things that would improve the process, so expecting them to do the obvious but difficult is not realistic. An example of poor handling of simple GEDCOM data is text from a Tag Memo, which is placed in a GEDCOM NOTE field on export, is not placed in the text field associated with events in the tree on import. Instead it is buried deep in a citation (even though it was not part of any citation in the GEDCOM). This means that any cautionary notes to add as Memo text are for practical purposes unfindable by readers. Another major flaw, which is probably difficult to handle in practice, is that there is no means to provide updated data to a tree via GEDCOM. So far as I know, you can't even add new people via GEDCOM to an existing tree and manually connect them to the existing people. The only choice is to add a whole new tree, which may explain some of the duplicate trees that plague the system. I'd really like to put more of my data up in Ancestry Trees to make it more accessible to others, but they currently make it very difficult. I would think that encouraging more advanced researchers to place date in their trees would make their system more valuable to all their users, but apparently they don't see it that way.

Sorry, Tom, but you are simply wrong. Yes, the tree displays the citations included an uploaded GEDCOM, but it fails to recognize those that come from Ancestry, as I said. As a result Ancestry will then provide you "hints" to the very source you cited. This renders the hints to Ancestry sources virtually unusable because the majority of them are already present in the data. That's what I described.

Dave, I've never uploaded a tree to Ancestry from FTM, but I know that when you do that from a GEDCOM the tree doesn't recognize any of the citations. So I just exclude most of my data when I do that and upload just BMDB data, and let Ancestry leave the citations unrecognized. That means I get tons of hints for sources I already have, but I've researched the folks I'm uploading pretty well so I'm not interested in that. I'm more interested in whether other trees have anything useful I've missed, and occasionally I find that. But mostly the hints from other trees are data entered differently or what they have is just wrong. With my own tree I can get it just as I want it, and I like that a lot better. Terry

Dave, That's the course I've adopted. I think that publishing TMG data with Second Site offers much more robust opportunities than Ancestry trees do. See my articles on use of Second Site, and the illustrations linked to that starting page. The one advantage to posting on Ancestry is the easy access by other Ancestry users. Ancestry does accept GEDCOM uploads, but pretty poorly - much is lost. However I have uploaded basic data on a couple of popular lines, and in over a year have had not a single contact from them.

Teresa, As Bob says, when this is resolved the results can be posted here. But in the meantime I want to make one clarification - there are no [s:rolename] variables. The variable is simply . It refers to the current subject - the person about which the output is being written - regardless of what role that person has, or where that person is entered in the Tag.

You're welcome, Tom.

Tom, I'd probably use the Manuscript (Unfilmed) Source Type. It's a great all-purpose Source Type for strange types of records that relate to an individual.

What information do you want to extract from them? School records are highly variable - I don't see how you can create any standardized approach. I'd just record what I thought was of interest in a Note or Anecdote tag.

Fiddler, You said you "Opened" the file on your computer. How did you do that? Did you Import it back into TMG? Or another genealogy program? Or open it in a text editor like Notepad? You did see the details when you did that? If so it would seem that the data is there. GEDCOM is a pretty simple thing - I don't know how it could be there and be "wrong" somehow. If the data is there the issue would seem to be in how FTDNA is reading the file. At Step 6 of the Export Wizard you have a number of ways to specify which Tags are to be included. You can specify All events, Primary events only, as well as including all or only certain types of Tags be included. At Step 5 you can specify to include the text of Memos or not by checking or un-checking the Memos box. I don't understand what you mean by the reference to Sentence Structures.

Anita, You can do this by creating a Custom Flag, using Flag Manager, on the File menu. I would give it values of N,Y. Then you set the Flag to Y for selected people with the Secondary Output of the List of People report. You turn on that feature by going to Options on that report, and on the Secondary Output tab tell it to change your Flag to Y. Now the trick is to define the "selected" people. You would do that with a Filter on the Report Definition screen. There are a number of approaches you might use, depending on what kind of data you have for the people of interest. For example you might filter on the dates of the birth and death Tags, but that depends on your having both those tags. Further, some people in the 1940 census would not have a death tag. Further, you may not have birth Tags for everyone. I would suggest you look for anyone with any event before 1940, AND who you have a death Tag for after 1940, OR who is marked as still living. However that would also pick up people long dead but for whom you have no death Tag and have not marked as not living, so it will get some false positives. But if your data is in pretty good shape there probably won't be too many. I would include the Birth tag in the output, and sort on it, which may help sort them out quickly. The filter to do what I suggest is: Any Event... Date ... ( ... Death.... Date ... > Comes After .... 1940 .... OR Living ... = Equals .... Y ... ) ... END The parens are important. You enter then by clicking the little boxes that appear after you select the OR connector in the second line.

You're welcome, Bob. I'm glad to hear you figured out a way to make it work.

You can, sort of. You can't actually change the internal one, but you can change the icon for the shortcut you use to open the program, whether you use one on the desktop or the Start Menu. When you do that the Taskbar icon will be the same as the one from the shortcut you used to open the program. However, when you send a report to screen and it creates a new window, the Taskbar icon for that window will be the one built into the program. If you want to try this, right-click on the shortcut and choose Properties. On the Properties screen click Change Icon, and find the icon you like. The TMG 4, 5, and 7 icons are in the "graphics" folder of the folder where TMG is installed and are easy to find.