elevator

Like the other poster said; that the years of birth are off by a year or two in census enumerations are not necessarily a reason to doubt the data you already have. I am fortunate to come from a part of the world that have reliable birth and baptismal records back to the mid 1600s and access to several censuses from the same area. It is in fact quite common that the years are off. The reasons for this may be many, including:

- Like "retsof" said; date may be based on the actual enumerator visit.

- Family may not know when the family member were born (mostly for older people, or people not present at the time of enumeration visit)

- Some places I have even seen rounding. If person was 18 years 10 months, I have seen it listed as both 18 and 19.

- Social standings may even impact the accuracy of date information in the census

At least where I come from originally (Norway), I have seen that prior to 1900, census enumeration may be quite riddled with innacrurate or "almost-but-not-quite" accurate data. The reason I can say this is precisely because of the good birth and baptismal records available so it is possible to compare census years to actual date recorded in birth and baptismal records.

If the census record is the ONLY primary source available, go with it. And if not; put things into perspective by using all available sources and recording all information available.

Ken.

I could understand one or two of them being off a year because of the relation of census date to the actual birth date, but all eight??? I am beginning to think the actual dates given by the family member are actually baptismal dates and not the birth dates.

Don't know if this helps at all: but there was a problem a while back that I myself experienced where citations randomly vanished from my database. Here's a link to the topic: http://www.whollygenes.com/forums201/index...?showtopic=4252

I have not since experienced disappearing citations. I am very particular about inputing citations for EVERY SINGLE piece of information so I would notice it quickly if it happened. From time to time I come across citations that doesn't belong to the tag in question; but that may be because of my own sloppiness.

Backing up your project daily is a good practice because you can then go back and find out if information is missing because of your own mistake or something "suspect" in TMG. I myself keep weekly backups of the database files (just the database files, no external exhibits etc) at least two years back so that should I have a problem like this again, I have older data to fall back on.

Hope someone else are able to help your case more specifically.

Good luck,

Ken.

I am not a newbie to TMG but not that computer literate so have stuck to very basics ie if I want a different tag name I find the nearest existing one and copy it. One tag that hasn't been touched is the Death Tag but when I've gone into several tonight the citation I had typed in has gone and so has the exhibit.

I agree 100% and that's exactly why I have resorted to using third party programs. While I think we all have wishes for future improvements, what we are doing here is providing solutions to problems that TMG either is never meant to address or currently does not address. Media exhibits is one of those things that are always going to be better handled by third party programs, because like you said, TMG's exhibit log is never meant to answer to/compete with programs like photoshop/elements or ACDsee.

Ken.

Some people grouse about the media limitations of TMG but one program can't do everything. TMG does not have the image management abilities of iMatch and the acquisition/editing abilities of PhotoShop or almost all other third party applications. And it never will. Exhibit management/acquisition/editing will always be done better outside of TMG. v7 will have some subtle changes in the Exhibit Log that make what you must do from the EL easier.

I was presented with the same problem when I initially started using TMG as I use a large number of scanned photos and digitized records in my research. Because of TMG's shortcomings in the exhibit area, I too have found that external programs is the way to go. I do of course add all my exhibits in the exhibit log but I always manage them outside TMG. For general viewing I use ACDSee 2.4 (which is an old version, but the last one to be really fast as the later versions started getting bloated and demanding on the system - ACDSee 2.4 fires up in under a second and allows quick zooming, quick navigating, etc). For image editing I use Photoshop and also Adobe Elements for management and it works great for me.

Don't get me wrong, TMG is without a doubt the best genealogy program out there, but certain things are just done better using external programs. Media exhibits is one of them.

Ken.

Unlike the normal windows (Details, Flags, Children, etc.) which can lose focus, the Exhibit Log appears to have been programmed to retain focus while it is open. The result is that I cannot have an exhibit open for viewing while working with other aspects (tags/events) of an individual. This becomes important, since I'm extracting information from my digital source to add to the database.

I use the Residence tag, but depending on your need magliz's suggestion may work better, especially if you need a customized sentence to go with it.

Ken.

I copied the marriage tag and renamed it "Partners" with a corresponding change to the sentence.

I agree with Terry. Don't be afraid to cite all the sources you have got (especially if they all are primary - that is; written at the same time as the event took place). A long list of primary sources means that the particular piece of information is well documented (and hopefully all those sources confirm eachother).

But it is also important to note that many sources does not always mean a well documented fact. I QUALITY of the source is critically important here; citing a website, a history book, an e-mail, etc. does not carry the same weight as actually reading the census charts, the church records or any other original source written at the time the event took place.

As such; it is not necessarily a bad thing having one or two sources. For example, in Norway outside the years when the censuses were performed, the only record really for birth is the church birth records. Confirmation records may contain the birth date, place and parents, but most of the time the priest got that information from the original birth records anyway. Therefore the only source really for the birth would be the church birth records. Me citing websites or other people's research of the same primary source does not make my research better.

My point here is that when citing sources; what really counts is the quality of the source, not the quantity. But if you can find a large number of high quality sources; that's fantastic and by all means cite them all!

And if two primary sources happen to have conflicing information such as different dates of birth, residences, date of death, etc. TMG makes it easy to record two birth tags or any other tag, as the case may be. May not look pretty; but the ability is there.

Ken.

You only have two sources??

 

In my view, key tags for a well researched genealogy will not have two, but more likely six to more than a dozen sources cited. Not that you would actually include that many in output, but rather select the best, sort them first (with the up/down arrows next to the citation window), and exclude the rest (with the right-click menu in the citation window).

Just a little example from Norway illustrating why it is important to keep track of places (at least in Scandinavia), and Norway is riddled with examples just like these:

Balsfjord and Malangen:

Before 1858, they both belonged to Tromso Parish. 2 Feb 1852, they were separated from Tromso to create their own parish: Balsford and Malagen Parish. In 1856, Balsfjord became the main parish. In 1870 the farms Ytre and Indre Navaren was transferred from Lenvik Parish to Malangen Parish. In 1872 the farms Bentsjord, Brokskar, Løgstad, Kvalnes and Bakkjord transferred from Malagen Parish to Tromsoysund Parish. In 1874 the farm Kilen was transferred from Lyngen to Balsfjord Parish. In 1890 the farm Malsnes was transferred from Malselv to Malangen Parish.

Not only was individual farms TRANSFERRED between parishes, they were also divided inbetween themselves:

Kjolo, Vestfold County, Norway:

Already before 1300, Kjolo was divided into three: Southern, Northern and Vestern Kjolo. Later it was divided again into one more: Eastern Kjolo. In 1660, Eastern Kjolo was divided into 2, each part farmed by two brothers. In 1770 Eastern Kjolo was joined back into one part under one owner. Several smaller farms spawned off of Eastern Kjolo after 1770: Kjoloholmen, Sparronningen, Kjololokken, and Brevigbugten, at which point Easter Kjolo as an individual farm did no longer exist.

I hope this illustrates the tremendeous task it is to track name changes in areas like this. If it were possible to have some kind of timeline in place for each place this would be really great. That way the program could also check for inconsistencies as far as places were concerned. Say I put that a person was born in Navaren farm in Lenvik Parish in 1890. This would obviously be wrong because Navaren farm was part of Malangen Parish in 1890. And if I was looking through the Lenvik church records, I would never find the person because his birth was recorded in an entirely different parish.

In cases such as this Michael's suggestion wouldn't really work. Right now I keep track of these things externally and it works. There are even books in Norway written to give timelines of these changes for different areas of Norway, so really it's not a BIG deal, but I'd really love to see the current place tracking feature of TMG to be extended as specified by the first poster (Nermal).

Ken.

I disagree with this. When it comes to family research I think it is very important to record the information EXACTLY as provided in the source. I try to make no assumptions about what a historic place is currently called; but I know what the place was called in, for example, the 1664 tax records, or in the 1700 census or the 1800 census without making any assumptions about what the place is called today. Hey, I might not even know WHERE the place is today!

Another reason I think it is important to follow the development of a particular place name is parishial borders. The parish to which a particular place or farm belongs may change over time and this knowledge is vitally important to track for church records. If I "normalize" the name to it's contemporay form I may miss where information about births, deaths, marriages etc. are recorded for a particular time span.

I am sure the importance of this may vary from country to country, but in Scandinavia where I have most of my family, the ability to track a place over time is of great value.

With that said, there may be nothing wrong with making things easy for the contemporary reader, but in my opinion it's more important to record the information accurately; it will make the historical record trail a whole lot easier to follow.

Ken.

I may be too new at this game to appreciate the subtleties, but it seems to me that the purpose of identifying the place is to tell the contemporary reader where it is. One runs into this sort of thing all the time with Poland. Poland, or pieces of it, have been Lithuania, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Sweden and Germany. Once in a great while they even let it be Poland.

I know IPS' Invision has a new version out which supports just what you are asking for...

I completely agree. I have the same problem in Norway where many townships and counties have either split into two or more or joined up. The problem is partially solved by the year-range option, but like you said, there's no way to indicate what the place was called before and after the specified time range.

Ken.

Frankly, I'm not overly sure of what good it does you to tell the program that the town was only called Yedintsy from this year until that year, if it won't then also allow you to tell it what is was called earlier and later.

Just a comment; this document was in Adobe's PDF format and as far as I can see TMG also exports reports in MS Word, and Richtext format. All these formats supports the use of tables and tabulators and so it seems silly that you must use fixed size fonts? Did I misunderstand something here?

Ken.

Re the columns not lining up properly: in the report options > fonts, choose a fixed, non-proportional font like Courier.

 

Virginia

Thank you for your great tips. I am generally one of those who do not like adding tags that I cannot specifically cite with a source, but I consider unknown birth tags to be a little different. (The other) Mike made a great point in that for someone to have existed they MUST have been born, so making a birth tag empty or with estimated dates should be ok when including/citing oneself as the "creator" and source of such data.

It seems like adding a birth tag and including an estimated birth year as sort date may be the way to go for me.

Thank you all for your great help!

Ken.

addendum: Estimating those missing birth years

 

I have just noticed that somewhere over the years, TMG began sorting "?" suffix dates in one group and all other dates in another group in some features. I have just noticed this on VCF Descendant Charts, but have not identified other features where this sorting anomally occurs. The work-around, if desired, is to remove the "?" suffix from the sort date field but leave it in the main date field. Sorry about that.

 

Best wishes,

Mike Talbot

 

PS: Use known dates from in-laws to tweek your estimated birth years (ie: spouses of siblings, etc.). Remember you are estimating/guessing a reasonable birth year not making a scientiific calculation.

Thanks for the quick reply Mike. That's certainly a good idea. I have generally been hesitant to add a birth tag if there is nothing to go in it, but if that solves the sorting issues I guess that's the way to go.

Thanks,

Ken.

Hi Ken

 

The way I handle that is to give every one of my people a birth tag, since I know they were born, whether I know the DOB or not. Then I put an approximate year in the sort date field for the birth tag that will place each child in the order that I would like them to appear.

 

Mike Daugherty

Frederick, Maryland

Good afternoon,

I have quit a few people in my database for whom I have no source for their year or date of birth (or even age), but do have good sources about the ORDER of birth (probate records, military enrollment records, population enumerations, etc). Now, I use the Birth Order flag to set the birth order, but in the Sibling and Children windows these are not displayed sorted by birth ordered, but rather appears in the order input. It would make sense to me to have these people display based on the order set in the birth order flag.

Also, in the detail screen, children without a birth date gets thrown together at the bottom (or the top, based on the configuration). I have noticed that there is no sort date for the son-bio, daughter-bio, etc. tags. Is there a reason for that? I would love to be able to sort these children into the tag list using sort dates.

Thanks,

Ken.

Oops, looks like I missed Roy's post. If it works it's great!

This is pretty much what Roy described in Post #2 above. It sounds like a great way to do it.

 

Virginia

Although I have not tried it myself maybe the following would work:

1. Make a backup of your project. (!!!)

2. Make a new Person (called RootPerson or something similar).

3. Add all your end-of-line ancestors as children of this person (even though they may not be related in real life)

4. Make a descendant chart with RootPerson as the focus person

5. Edit the resulting chart to remove the RootPerson person and cut all descendant ties to this person

Lot of work, but it seems to me, maybe a little less work than trying to copy and paste large end-of-line descendant branches into VCF?

Again, I have not tried this yet, so I may be completely and totally off with this.

Ken.

Just as a side note:

I used Sierra Generations many years ago (yuck), and that program could make a chart of the entire project, but with some nasty caveats: I for example have one ancestor, whose 4 children I am all a direct descendant of. And 20-30 other's where two siblings are both direct ascendants to me. So naturally in such a chart there would be a vast number of duplicate boxes unless an incredibly smart system is derived where the program detects such colliding branches and join them up where necessary. Sierra Generations made a total mess out of my complete tree, and I found myself never wanting to use that particular charting function again.

So in a way I can understand why WhollyGenes have been reluctant to discuss such a charting feature: it must be a nightmare to design. But if they can get it to work; it would be "totally awesome".

Ken.

Norway is a little different than most countries. Here is what I mean: In Norway (especially in Northern Norway) priests had a large area to cover. A person who died from natural causes could not lay around and wait for the priest to arrive in the village but was instead BURIED. It is here very important to notice that burials are NOT church events. Instead the priest would later arrive and so something called "Jordfestelse" in Norwegian. Jordfestelse IS a church event and thus recorded in the church records. In many districts only the actual death date and the jordfestelse was recorded, not the actual burial.

So what I am trying to get to here, is that a person may have died from natural causes, was buried by a group of people close to him or her without ANY interference from the church. When the priest then arrived at the district he would to "jordfestelse" on all the people who died and was buried since his last visit. That is why you may see several jordfestelse at one time, sometimes as much as 3-6 months after the actual death.

If you go to the norwegian Digital Archives this is explained in detail in post 5026 in Debattforumet. http://www.digitalarkivet.no/

Notice the same for old births. The actual birth was NOT a church event, and so only the baptismal date (and sometimes the introduction - about 30-40 days after a natural birth) was recorded. For newer records, however, you will find more complete recordings of all dates involved with births and deaths.

I suggest you read up on what exactly is recorded in those church records, otherwise as records get older, confusion will no doubt arise! Of course, with all that said; there is the remote possibility of something bad like an accident happened; but in most cases that would have been noted in the church records, especially with as many as 5 people involved.

Ken.

Found some unlogic information in a church-register:

Great-grandmother died (Death date) 14. nov. 1863 - she was buried february 1864?? What happened? - Lost in snowstorm? lost in a ferry-disaster (Probably something like this due to 5(?) burials the same day!??

Any information around historic events available anywhere??

 

Thanks anyway!?

 

Arne Myklebost

arne_myklebost@hotmail.com

I had honestly forgot about that command, that of course makes things quite a bit easier!

Ken.

SUBST G: W:\

For this to work, one must take great care to assure that the external hard drive gets assigned the same drive letter on each machine everytime it is hooked up (in these days with multiple cd/dvd media, thumb drives, card readers, and network drives this can be quite challenging). This is because the fixed path storage scheme that TMG uses. And if you are REALLY honest, you must also check the TMG license to make sure installing it on multiple machines does not infringe on the licensing agreement In any event, I am following this and many other similar threads with great interest as I would absolutely love to see the possibility to carry my project around with me on an external hard drive in future releases.

Ken.

Can you not install the program and directory on each pc? you would then transport the external hard drive between pcs and the relevant fonts/files/registry entries would be in place on the internal hard drive of each machine

One more comment; maybe outside the subject; but if TMG used relative rather than fixed paths to store external exhibits, the portability of TMG would be drastically improved, inlcuding the option of putting the project files on an external hard drive. I know this has been discussed MANY times before, just thought I'd yet again express my wishes to have the portability improved in the next release...

There is a work around for this though; although it requires quite a bit of techincal knowledge. Providing you have a BIOS that supports it, it is possible to boot an operating system such as Windows XP directly from a USB external harddrive. It is then possible to install TMG on the external hard drive operating system and work with it from any computer whose BIOS supports the USB boot option. I have used this myself with great success with both Windows and Linux.

No. TMG must be installed on the system that it's going to run on. Many required support files are installed to the system32 folder. Fonts are installed to the fonts folder.

I find that the current decoupled windows approach is great, and adds a superiority over other genealogy programs. I, for example, spend a LOT of time in Person view and so I create a layout that fits my needs exactly. For those circumstances where I do spend some time in Family or Tree view I can create separate layouts for those, and frankly TMG makes it really easy to switch between layout configurations.

For the picklist, I have to agree with Jim. I use the picklist to quickly locate someone, and would prefer not to sit and wait for the program to render pretty colors. If I do, the extended picklist and even the project explorer does the job just wonderfully (I think anyways).

Now, the last 10 people viewed, I complete agree with you. I sometimes wish the list was a little bit longer. I find it very discouraging when I am working on a few large families and previously viewed people fall out of the last viewed list.

I rarely use the tree view and when I do it's mostly to get a quick overview of the ancestors, but I can definitely see how a little more information on this view could be useful.

Ken.

The following important funtionality has been lost in TMG 6 vs TMG 4:

 

1. There are no BMD dates on the TMG 6 Tree View (the mouse over dates do not help when comparing genrations or across generations)

2. You are limited to the last 10 viewed people with the View button in TMG 6 (20 or user defined as in TMG 4 would be better).

3. The standard Picklist does not have color Accent ability (I find the extended Picklist to be awkward)

4. Can you do what you did in your example to make the Family view useful, without screwing up the more important Person and Tree views?

 

I sincerely wish that these good TMG 4 features were restored to TMG 6, best wishes,

 

Mike Talbot

Maybe I misunderstood your question but a person without a mother and a father, invariably would have no ancestors, unless you added a mother and father as persons with names such as "Unknown" (and then build the ancestral tree from there if you do know grandparents, great grandparents, etc).

If you want to make an ancestral chart with empty boxes, you must do that manually in Visual Chartform (which is pretty easy to do).

Ken.

I'm Baaack! LOL!

 

How do I generate a report that only shows ancestors of a particular dog (person) that are missing father and mother?

 

In PAF it was easy, in TMG I'm lost!

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Julie

I definitely second that! I frequently take pictures of places and houses I visit and use maps as well.

Ken.

I've only had a quick look at past postings and can't see this one there, so sorry if it is a repeat..

 

I wish that the MPL had a column with a tick in it if the place had an exhibit attached, and/or something in the memo field, just like in the Person display screen.

 

I never can remember which particular form of a place name is the one I've written up with a memo, or attached exhibits too.

 

'twould also be good if there was a count of events using a place without having to open the Events to see (like in the Source list)

In previous posts I have read that it is the last accessed spouse in a configuration where multiple spouses exists for a particular person who is displayed in the siblings and children windows.

This has become quite the annoyance for me, because as I navigate the tree I find that who I want to be displayed in these windows are not necessarily who are displayed. I find it cumbersome to re-edit the "correct" spouse everytime I edit one of the other spouses.

What is on my wishlist is the ability to set one of the spouses as preferred. That way it is possible to automatically display the spouse that I am directly related to. This would also solve the problem with more recent couples where I would want the CURRENT spouse displayed instead of the last one edited.

I have seen this feature incorporated into other genealogy programs, and would like to hear some opinions for/against?

Ken.