elevator

I agree to disagree. We are all going to have different opinions, so maybe John's suggestion to let the thread sleep is a wise decision. But I do want to comment a little bit on surety; Marriage Church records, city hall records and actually talking to the married couple represent the ultimate in surety, while automatically constructing names based on what is only statistically probable represents, in my opinion, the lowest surety. You're right; any source and research efforts has it faults, but why not rely on the most reliable sources available? As for using it as a finding aid; let me provoke a little. What about automatically constructing birth dates and death dates based on average age of a person so we can search that way too? It becomes rather absurd. But let me get back to the original post in this thread; I do think TMG is so popular partly because of it's unsurpassed documentation ability, and to live up to that image, it seems counter intuitive to default to any automatic data. If anything is to change, an option dialog that allows both sides of the fence to decide for themselves would perhaps be the most liberal way to do it. Elev.

Unfortunately, data has an ugly way of becoming "real" even if the original intention was not as such. Again, my way of working with genealogical data may differ, but I would never ever input anything into my family tree unless I can back it up with sources. When you automatically add data, what are you going to put as a source? Unless you have documentation that supports the use of one name or another is seems wrong (and scary) in my mind to include it. Elev.

I figured that I would yet again throw in my two cents, again no offense intended. I have to agree with Mike. Most of my research (95%) is in Norway. I am a first generation immigrant to the United States. My Norwegian research goes back to around 1500, some lines a little longer and luckily for me good church records exist back to late 1500's in most cases. Anyway, my point is that in Norway most names before ca. 1870 were patronymical. All children got their father's first name as their last name, so we have lots of last names like Hansen (son of Hans) and Hansdatter (daughter of Hans). These are in fact so common that I have more than one 100 EACH of Hansen, Johansen, Nilsen, etc., etc. And according to the church records married names are unheard of. A Hansdatter remained Hansdatter even after marrying Nilsen. So I am of course a little biased when it comes to this whole discussion about married names. Ok, so I realize not everyone have Norwegian genealogy in their family tree, but we must not forget that each and everyone of us have vastly different genealogical perspectives and so our needs may be a little different. For me automatically adding married names or automatically adding any kind of information for that matter seems scary. Elev.

It certainly wasn't my intention to offend you in any way. When I was talking about safety, I was referring to the possibility that we may list a married name for a female who is in fact not married under that name. Yes, you are right that the statistics are in your favor at the time, but by defaulting to "no", there will be no mistakes. One mistake is one mistake too many. Little more work? Certainly; but in my opinion worth it. But I do agree with you on one thing; having an option in the options dialog allowing us to choose what we want would certainly be valuable, and fit my needs as well as yours. Bottom line for me though; accuracy rules over workload reduction. Maybe I am just old fashion or maybe I just have way too much time on my hands, but I do like to control every little piece of information that goes into my database. Automation scares me! Anyways, I wasn't trying to tell you your view was wrong, simply that mine differs and that if anything is to be changed in TMG it should be done to fit both needs. Elev.

Quick question: I have noticed that the new version 6 allows images to be added to place names. This is a great feature and I want to take advantage of it. I am a bit scared though: it seems that list place list is automatically added based on events that happened in that particular place. Say now I delete the event... will the corresponding entry in the place list be deleted too? What if I have an image attached to the place, will the place (with the attached image) still be deleted? Elev.

That should probably be sufficient then. I have a lot of places I want to include exhibits for (like old family properties and the like) and I want to make absolutely sure everything I input is preserved. Your tests indicate that is indeed the case. Thanks, Elev.

I almost think the default to no on married names makes more sense. More and more women live in an unmarried relationship and have children without being married. Also more and more women keep their maiden names or hyphenate their married names and maiden names. In addition; a default to yes on automatically construct married names for females may cause other undesired effects... it may cause a married name to be constructed for someone who shouldn't have it and I just didn't notice. I think it is safer for it to default to no. In my personal opinion I would rather live with the pesky button popping up or manually adding married names if it means I can avoid any accidental naming errors. Elev.

Good evening, I have a question; I was printing a descendant report today and it prints with cut marks when the report is larger than a single page. So far so good. Now I noticed that some boxes are cut when they are exactly in between two pages. In this process about 1/10 on a inch or so is lost, so that when I tape the pages together about 1/10 of the box is gone. It just happens that this cuts a few names short, like I have a name Aragon that becomes just Araon with the g missing because it got lost. I know this can be fixed by just moving the boxes so that they don't appear right on the page cutmarks, and it's really no big deal, but I still thought it was rather strange that a little piece of the page would just disappear. Is this a bug? Elev.

On the product description for TMG it says it can be used to create a book complete with table of contents, footnotes, indexes and bibliography so apparently most of the elements needed for a book can be made with the so-called "Book Manager". I have never tried it myself, but when I read on the features page that it is possible to create a book I would assume that it is possible, perhaps not well documented? Ken.

If that is indeed the case, that the data is still in the table, it is wonderful news. Just as a side note, when I first noticed my problem (Jan 28th 2005), the citation box listed the citation count, but showed no citations, so what you're saying makes sense. When I ran VFI this count disappeared. What does VFI do with citations that experience the problem you describe? I see light at the of the tunnel at last Ken.

Hi Jim! I haven't had the problem yet after I reinstalled my system. Which is why in a previous post I played with a theory that involved having installed thrid-party database engines. I am a programmer and program database front-ends using a lot of different database technologies (including FoxPro) and so I thought maybe that was the reason for my problems (at that point the problem didn't seem to be so wide-spread). I did send my database to Bob Velke twice. He told me there was really nothing he could do because he was unable to reproduce the problem. My problem first appeared when I upgraded from V5 to V6. Since then weird things have been happening. I also sent a very detailed description of the problem complete with screenshots to Bob Velke, but I didn't hear back. Both the project files and the detailed description was sent shorty after V6 was released (I can get an approximate date by looking at the purchase receipt for V6 if needed). If you need me to resend anything let me know. I am a little bit apprehensive about sending my entire project because it does contain some rather private information. Is there a way I can send you my project without having to include certain things? I know you guys are really professional and that you would never in any way compromise the data, but it just makes me sleep better if I know the only complete copy stays with me I can, however, send a backup I have from early 2005 with a V5 project. This project when updated to V6 is the one that caused the problem in the first place. Bob Velke should, however, already have it. Thanks for your help, Jim. Ken.

I agree with pktropics. I am also willing to bet that there are quite a few people out there who have this problem without even knowing it. If someone do not record their sources for every single piece of information, determining if citations disappeared or not, is REALLY hard. I urge everyone to keep a really close eye on their citation count in the project statistics screen. I am a relatively new user of TMG and I don't use many of the more advanced features of the program, and so as far as a trigger goes, we must assume that it is not some obscure combination of unlikely events that causes this problem, but rather that it exists in EVERY project and until some true reason or "trigger" is found it is treated as such. The potential here is for people to have years of research made unreliable and that really scares me. Ken.

I know for a fact it happens in other instances too because I have never used Ctrl-F3 either and I still have citations disappearing on me. I have stopped using any combination of the F3... just in case. So far I have not noticed any additional citations disappearing, but I am keeping close watch now. I make daily backups and I save ALL my previous backups so I can go back an check. Just like the previous poster pointed out, kind of makes you loose faith in the program, which advertises it's unsurpassed citation capability in the first place. I had sent a few screenshots before the forum messages were deleted showing how VFI effectively deletes all traces of the citation, so definetly do not use VFI if you're trying to recover lost citations. I have had situations where the citations were counted (i.e. the citation screen showed 3 citations for a particular event, but no citations are actually listed, when I ran VFI the count was reduced to 0 with still no citations showing and I knew from backup projects that I in fact had citations for that particular event). So there are without a doubt some weird things going on with the citations. What makes it even more dangerous is that they are so darn hard to spot unless you keep backups and ritually record your sources. Ken.

If you have traced your roots as far back as that you may encounter some problems counting generations because of intermarriage. I have more than a dousin lines that are the results of intermarriage and where one family member that married another family member in a previous or later generation and thus became offset as far as the generation number is concerned. I have one extreme case of this where one of my family members is the member of 4 different generations only because he had children with several women from a very early age to a very old age and it so happened all these women had children who eventually was tied back into the family tree. I only know this because before switching to TMG I used Sierra Generations which did show generation numbers and on the reports I would see the same person appearing in four different generations. I don't know how Sierra implemented the feature of showing all generations a person is a member of, but I suspect it may be quite processor intensive. Ken.

Good evening, I have a question for you masters out there: I have regular contact with a few family members that I am VERY distantly related to. We're talking 7 and 8 cousins here. I am very hesitant to include these branches in my regular family tree because I fear they will only clutter things up. Is there a way to add these branches into the family tree but still maintain the integrity of the main database? I was thinking something like adding a new dataset for each of these family branches. If I do that, is it then possible to hide that dataset or delete it entirely in the future should I decide I do not need it anymore? What will happen to the parent/child links if for example the parent is in one dataset and the child is in another? Just wondering if someone else have done this already and if so how they did it. Thanks, Ken V. Nordberg

That's good to hear. What gets me is that the citations are there at one point and then through some random, yet-to-be-discovered mechanism citations get deleted. I almost wish it was possible to turn on some kind of debug logging feature were we can log all read and write attempts to and from the database and if we notice writes that really should not be there, something's up. It just really sucks because TMG is without a doubt the best program out there, particularily because of it's source features. Ken V. Nordberg.

There was a lengthy discussion about this in the old forum before the messages were deleted. I was one of those who lost sources as well. I have since reinstalled my operating system and as of yet have not had any problems (keeping my fingers crossed). What happened to me is that random sources seemed to simply disappear. There seemed to be no pattern or way to tell which sources disappeared. Sometimes ALL source citations for a particulr event would disappear and sometimes just ONE or SOME of them would disappear. I wish I was able to reproduce exactly what happened so we could assist WhollyGenes in correcting the problem, but unfortunately I have found no way of telling when and how it happens. I do wish to perhaps throw something at the developers (although it may be a total shot in the dark). I do database development and on my old system I had Visual Studio C++ 6.0 with Visual FoxPro installed. I also had updated several database drivers such as ODBC and ADO. When I reinstalled my operating system I purchased Visual Studio .NET. This does not come with the FoxPro drivers and I have also not installed any additional and updated database drivers and now I have no problems with missing citations. But like I said, probably just a shot in the dark... Ken V. Nordberg

I recently had to reinstall my operating system for stupidity reasons and when reconstructing the family tree from backups (that I thankfully do weekly) I realized that all the external exhibits had on the old computer been on the F: drive while in the new installation I had removed a partition and so now the family tree was on the C: drive. This of course caused all the external exhibits to be missing. I have since gone through every single exhibit and updated the path, but I always thought the path stored in the database was relative? So if I have set the external exhibit path in the configuration to be C:\FamilyTree\Exhibits\ and I choose the path \Person1\Portrait.jpg for the exhibit, it would make the total path C:\FamilyTree\Exhibits\Person1\Portrait.jpg right? But if I change the External Exhibit path to lets say F:\Exhibits\ the path stored in the database remains C:\FamilyTree\Exhibits and so the exhibit cannot be found? Is this right? If so it makes it really hard to move the database from computer to computer, or am I missing a feature that lets you update paths to external exhibits easily? Thanks, Ken V. Nordberg

I think the exhibit system works satisfactorily, the only annoying part is the fact that paths are stored in their absolute form for external exhibits. Not that I would know; but could it possible be that much work "code-wise" to make these paths relative? I mean afterall I find it rather superfluous to have a config option to set the root-external-exhibit-path only to not really use it. In any event, it hasn't really become an issue for me yet as I just barely have a thousand exhibits and going through and update the paths haven't been that much of a pain, but I can imagine later on it may be an issue. About the 3rd party programs: I think if this is an important feature, maybe we should rely on TMG and not third party programs for this? I must assume that I am not the only one who move my database from home to the office to laptop with unavoidable changes in the root drive letter. I guess I am just naturally suspicious when in comes to third party programs and would rather rely on native functionality, although I do have to admit there are some pretty darn good TMG extensions out there. Ken V. Nordberg

Just as a side note, another reason for keeping the branches outside of the main dataset is of course that the research is done by someone else and the sources need to be verified. I would be really hesistant about adding unproven information to the main tree. Of course I guess I could just make a flag indicating that this particular individual needs their sources verified.... Ken.

Thanks for your reply Terry. Some of these lines represent the research from other family members on a particular line and may in some cases contain thousands of individuals, but as my own family tree only contains around 5000 people, maybe you're right, that it wont be too much of a problem. Thanks for clarifying the downsides about datasets. I didn't know that you couldn't link between datasets, which makes them really unattractive. I guess you learn something new every day! I was really looking for a way to link branches to the main tree without having to include it in the main dataset, but after reading your help I realize it may be impossible without including the data in the main tree. Thanks Terry. Ken V. Nordberg.