Terry Reigel

Bob, You need a reliable system to backup all your important data, including your TMG backups, copies of source documents, emails, correspondence, and non-genealogical data like financial and tax records. You need to have copies of those backup both off your computer locally and away from your home. I think it is far better to include your external exhibits in that backup system and not within your TMG backups. Including them in your TMG backup makes your backup larger and slower for little or no purpose.

Sorry, my error. I'd forgotten you could specify the elements of each Primary of a Tag Type in the box charts. So you can indeed include the output of the memo, so long as the Tag is primary, as it normally would be.

David, You can't include Other Event Tags in charts, so you cannot directly reflect religion based on information recored in Tags. However with box charts you can set accent colors based on Flags. So if you record the information in a Flag you could display people's religion by use of colors. If you have religion recorded in tags you could use the secondary output of the List of People or List of Events reports to set a Flag or Flags.

When you refer to the "Key" I assume you mean the field labeled "Key" in the Edit Flag window. If so, that is simply a memo field which you can contain any notes about the use of the Flag. It has no actual connection to the Values available in that Flag. If the Key is wrong, open Flag Manager, from the File menu. Select the Flag in question and click the Edit button. The field labeled "Description" is the same as the one labeled "Key" in the Edit Flag window (I have no idea why they are labeled differently). Edit the contents of the Description field to suit. You can put anything you like there - notes on what the Flag is used for, an actual key to the allowed values, or anything else.

Bob, Maybe. It depends on how you have done the citations. You described before what seems like a somewhat unusual way to do citations. Are these citations only to your Family Tag, or might they be to other Tags as well?

Bob, I put a description of the exhibit in the Memo of the tag so it is easy to see in the Details view. But I seldom have more than two exhibits for any one person. I only make exhibits of photos or drawings related to the person, not images of sources. How to you use the source images? In reports, in Second Site, from the Details View, or ??

Bob, Another approach is to create a custom "photo" Tag which is then independent of any other Tag. I use them for all my exhibits because it gives my better control over where they appear in narratives created with Second Site. An image doesn't necessarily fit best attached to a Tag that is near the end of the narrative.

Bob, It looks like you have not defined these elements. This is not a standard Source Type, and these Elements are not standard Source Elements. Defining them is simple enough, but you need to take care that you do not assign them to Groups that are used elsewhere in the same Source Type. One way to do that is to open a Source Definition using this Source Type and click on the name of the Element on the General tab. You will then be offered only Groups not already in use. To understand more about Source Elements and Groups you may find my article Working with Source Elements and Groups helpful.

Mills has to do with Source Types, not Tags, so that can't be the origin of it. Your use however is close to what I hypothesized. You attach the Tag to the earliest ancestor of a line and everyone else as Witnesses. But you said first you wanted to "cite" the document. You Cite a document in TMG by creating a Source for it, then creating a Citation to that Source. But you say you are attaching the document as an Exhibit. That's a very different thing than creating a Citation. By creating a Tag with each member of the family attached as Principal or Witness you can of course attach an Exhibit or a Citation, or both. You will get quite different results in reports from a Citation or an Exhibit, so one may better serve your purposes.

Bob, How would you cite this for the head of the family? Citations are attached to Tags - names, events, or relationships. They cannot be attached to people. The Family Tag is not a standard Tag, so you must have created it. How do you use it? You could cite the Source in that Tag and have it appear for everyone in the family, but only if you attach everyone in the family as a Witness to that Tag. How do you want this Citation to be seen? In reports? Which types? From on-screen? It's hard to imagine how it would be very useful without a clear plan for it's display.

You're welcome, Dianem.

R L, That's why the Select All button is there. When you want to add Spouses you first click Select All to select everyone already in the Focus Group, then use the Add Others feature.

What reports? If you create an Ancestors or Descendants report that starts with someone in an existing family, of course people who are not part of that family will not appear in it. Other types of reports will include everyone who is specified by the way you define the report, so could well include people not in your existing family. For example, if you created a List of People report for everyone with any event in New York, it could well include people not in the family. Attaching a family group to the existing family is simple. Create a Parent/Child Relationship Tag or a Marriage Tag with a person in the main family and the appropriate person in the formerly unrelated family. Now they are connected.

Judy, Obviously, "connected" can mean whatever is helpful to you. My thinking is I want to know who I have entered because they have some link to the family, even by marriage, as opposed to people who I have entered because they have a name or some other attribute that caused me to wonder if there might be a connection, even though none has been proved. So I include connections by marriage as "connected." I do not include people who I enter as Witnesses because a family member was living with them or had some other transaction when I've not found any blood or marriage connection. That serves my purposes, but yours may differ.

Judy, My article on Connected Flags tells you how to set it for everyone who is already entered. Then you only have to manage it for new people that you add later. However, in my definition, parents or siblings of spouses are still connected. So the method I describe will not mark them as un-connected.

There are a number of places where you can download the last version of TMG8, which by the way is 8.08, which is what you should be using. See, for example, my website.

I agree totally with Michael. The downside is you loose the ability to tell easily which people are known to be related and which are not.

Yes, that's the way I'd do it. Start by adding an "unrelated person" then add the rest of the family related to that person. Well, you can always delete them if you decide to by moving them to a temporary data set, then deleting that data set. But why delete them? You may find reference to them in the future and if you keep them you will have the information to know they are not part of your line.

Judy, I think separate data sets are a pointless pain. I just add them in my regular dataset. I do mark them as not connected using Accents and my Connected Flag -- see Using Accent Colors -- so it is easy to see in the Picklist and elsewhere that they have not been connected to the rest of my people.

Len, Like all of us, Harry has had messages go astray for unknown reasons. I've sent him an email to make sure he sees your post.

Recent versions of Word include the ability to output in PDF format. I would look for publishers that accept PDF input, so you know what the book looks like when you send it to them.

Doris, I'm afraid I can't help. I've never thought TMG's scan feature was of any use. I always scan with my scanner's software, then edit the image (crop, straighten, adjust contrast, re-size, and in photos sometime fix blemishes) in an image editing program before saving them as exhibits.

Bob, The recommended citations for published items, like books, do not include Repositories because it is expected that they are available from multiple locations. For very rare items a Repository may be appropriate, but to use it you will have to modify the Source Type to include it. The recommended models for citations do not include showing whether you have a copy yourself, but you can certainly add that information if you want. You could to that by way of a Repository (but if the item already requires a Repository you cannot have two Repositories appear in a single source note) or in the Comments field. If you do the latter you may need to add the [COMMENTS] Source Element to the Source Type if it's not already there.

If you are not getting the TRLR at the end something is interfering with TMG writing the GEDCOM. It has nothing to do with which people you are including, but with some other program operating on your computer on the folder where TMG is writing the GEDCOM. The usual suspects are cloud backup programs and some antivirus programs.

What do you mean they are not connected? Not connected where?