Nick Shelley

John, It is possible that you are getting a complaint from a spyware checking program or something similar which is seeing access to this temporary TMG program as being an illicit activity. Do you have such a program running? Nick Shelley

Whilst I was accumulating all sorts of fascinating family material, I thought that to pass on my research, all I had to do was print it out using one of the multi-generational reports like the Descendant Indented Narrative or the Journal Report. I thought the choice of which to use was a matter of style, but it isn't, it is also a matter of substance. When I eventually came to look into this more seriously I realised that there was a real problem with this approach. With increasing numbers of generations, the reports become unwieldy; it becomes harder to mentally keep in touch with which part of the tree you are in until in the end the report becomes too heavy to read. I had also not realised the difference between the two main types of report: individual and descendant narrative reports exclude the birth of an individual's children so that their narrative is stripped of this genealogically and socially central explanation of their lives. The Journal report suffers from the same attitude to children but tries to compensate for this by adding the children at the end of the parents' narrative as if one were counting the number of cars they had owned over their lifetime. I recognise that Wholly Genes think long and hard about their choices so I know that there will be good rationales for treating children as historical appendages, but I don't find this approach helpful. Giving up on large and unwieldy generational reports, I decided to create an 'encyclopaedia' of names arranged in alphabetical order. I chose to use the Journal report, set to one generation depth, because it does at least include the names and details about an individual's children and because it adds some of the details of the wife's life. Over many days I constructed a series of surname filters that gradually encompassed all those that I had researched. Microsoft Word dictates the size of the file that it will open in its name and this means that I could not create one filter per letter of the alphabet which would have looked nice. In the end 33 Journal reports were needed. My huge sense of relief lasted up to the moment when I came to analyse how many pages I would have to print and in the process also checked on the number of people involved. I have two versions of the encyclopaedia, one private because they include people still living; the other public which includes only those who have already died. Even the public version came to over 8,000 pages, whilst the private one was over 10,000 pages. How one's research quietly builds up! I set the report conditions so that only BMD details would be shown for parents' children; the fuller details of their lives could then be expressed on their own pages. Problems about which people are or are not 'carried forward' to the next generation would not arise as each person's narrative is created by a 1-generation report - no one is carried forward. Thus aunt Coreen Crawford who remained unmarried throughout her life would be briefly mentioned as a child of her parents whilst the fuller details of her life would be shown on her own page. The same for her mother, the only difference being that she had been married. Except this isn't what happened. Maiden aunt Coreen does appear as the child of her parents Andrew and Gertrude but the filter ("surname comes after Ci and before Cz") does not seem to find her and so she does not have an entry in her own name. Her mother who did marry IS found, as expected, under her maiden name. However my equally married wife does NOT appear under her maiden name. Coreen's brother who did marry but had no children does appear. But another relative, an uncle who did not marry, does not appear. Whatever the rules being played out here, all the people missing CAN have their Journal reports created manually using the same journal conditions except for the filter. The filter states, in the example of my missing wife: 1. TYPE is not A (ie: P is not an archival item) AND 2. TYPE is not E (ie: P is not a census result) AND 3. Surname comes after Wd AND 4. Surname comes before WJ. There is no mention of gender or marital status. I do know that there is a 'way around this' and that is choose the report settings so that all the details of a child's life are given if they do not marry. But there are reasons why I don't find this entirely satisfactory: 1) someone looking for a person's name alphabetically simply will not find them; 2) it can break-up the clarity of the parent's narrative if brief BMDs are given for the married children whilst non-married children can have several pages of their own; and 3) whilst they can be found if an index is generated (as a child to the parent), frankly I would like to be able to generate an independent entry for each person regardless of their marital and gender status. My concerns are threefold: 1. without luck, I would never have known that people were going missing 2. although there will be good reasons for these findings, I don't know what they are and I guess others may not either 3. creating an encyclopaedia or list of each person researched should not be this hard. Just as much as I want to know what settings I need so that people are not missed out, I would like to see Wholly Genes prepare a worked example so that others can successfully pass on all that they know confident that there are no programming quirks which would undermine this intention. Nick Shelley

Many thanks for your thoughts, Terry. It would be very reassuring to me to have an assured report format. I do not feel that I have an acceptable way of passing on my stuff in hard copy and feel in a kind of uncomfortable limbo. I shall attempt to live a little longer & wait Nick

Terry, here are my thoughts on the subject: TMG boasts that its database can hold as many people as you can put in it, or rather, it will not be the limiting factor on the number of people you research and wish to record. Genealogy is an addictive pastime. Many people end up spending several decades doing research. The urge to research is generally far greater than the desire to review one’s progress in a physical output. The longer people research, the more likely they will be surprised by how much information they have accumulated. And by how much extra space the sources (endnotes, bibliography) and the indexes take in each report. The more restricted one’s interest and focus of research, the easier it is to put this into intelligible hard copy by using the reports TMG provides. My situation is this: I have researched most but not all the ancestral names for myself and my wife (and therefore our children). One family tree goes back to the beginning of the 1500’s, a couple to the 1600’s, most to the 1700’s. I have also been interested to see to what extent these families have generated living descendants today over and above our own family. This has been both interesting and useful as some living cousins have been able to throw light on members of our family as well as provide photos of them. In the process of researching up to 13,000 people, I have also accumulated over 8,000 pictures. Researching cousins as well as direct descendants causes the ancestral tree to be much wider at each generation and this makes generational reports more complex to view and to navigate around even when separated into individual generations per file. Clarifying ancestral relationships sometimes requires the research of non-ancestral families; some families have intermarried with our line, sometimes more than once, and one may build up a small cohort of reasonably researched non-ancestral families as well as one’s own. In passing on the totality of one’s research to other researchers in hard copy form, it seems to me that the encyclopeadic format has most to offer. It covers all people researched whether ancestral or accidental; the index will identify all examples of a person’s entry as well as the variations in their name. It can be augmented by relationship charts. I think that it deserves to be a supported output option by WG. Here is an example of how the Encyclopeadic Report has advantages over, for example, the Descendant Indented Narrative Report. After all, this is where I started. I created DIN reports for all the ancestral families that I had done a decent amount of work on. For my family line, this meant 46 separate surnamed Descendant Indented Narrative reports, although perhaps four were a bit thin. For my wife’s line, this added another 23 separate reports. After rather clumsy searching I also identified 40 other families that I had done a significant amount of work on (ie: researching two or more generations). This still left out the other people who only played bit parts in my family’s creation. These reports looked great, in my mind, imagining them spreading across a shelf with the surnames emblazoned across their backs. But then, who would think of looking in the Astbury report for someone with the name Bagguley or in the Willett report for an Esther Buckley? In retrospect, not only were the large reports too heavy to read, they served my needs better than those of another researcher. With a brief sigh at the time taken to generate all these reports (at least electronically), I have given up on this approach. The Encyclopeadic Report seemed to cover all the bases. Now all those Descendant Indented Narratives could be converted to simpler outlines of generational relationships, using either Descendant Indent Charts or VCF charts, which could be used to supplement the Encyclopaedic Report. I still believe that in TMG’s present incarnation the Journal report has the most to offer of the existing reports. Only a small variation of this report would make the encyclopeadic report possible: simply, the ability to create a Journal style report for people with no offspring. If this were achievable then the only other sophistication I would look forward to, within this context, would be to have integrated indexes across the surname ranges. Perhaps these could be created within the Book Manager? My second comment is that I still feel that the above form of the Encyclopeadic Report, depending as it does on either the Individual Narrative or the Journal Report format, is outmoded. I respect the programmers’ decision to maintain consistency with standard genealogy journals. I for one do not provide reports to journals; I have no idea how many TMG users do. But I do find it strange that the genealogical heart of a person’s narrative, their children, is treated in a such a bizarre and psychologically unsatisfactory way. Obviously the presence of children, their gender, health and lives all significantly affect the decisions a family makes during its lifetime; to leave out such events from a person’s narrative is for me deeply unsatisfactory, more so because we are talking about a genealogy program. Terry, you have said that there is currently no tag sentence for a birth or baptism yet recent TMG updates have created new tags. I would have thought that there could be an option in each birth or baptism tag for the user to select that the event is, or is not, reflected on the parents’ pages as an event. As in the case of the new NarrativeChildren tag, the user could design the most acceptable default sentence. Where there already exists a tag sentence, because the user has already felt it necessary to manually add the parents as witnesses to the event, then the default sentence condition would not be triggered. Thirdly, I know that WG sets a very high store on ensuring that the data in TMG remains secure even when things are not going quite to plan. Understandably users need to feel that their years of work are completely safe in WG’s hands. I am, indeed we all are, getting older and for me the earlier need for data stability is being equalled by the need to be confident that I can pass on these years of work fully and intelligibly. Although Terry has quite rightly identified that people without children don’t get a narrative of their own, there is still the case of my wife who is missing from the Journal report; we have two children, so she should be in the report under her maiden name. Large reports are very time consuming to check even when you are looking for a particular detail; it is a burdensome task that none of us would like to feel that we _need_ to do, although we may choose to do so for our own confirmation. If my wife can be absent when she would seem to pass the criteria for being present I don’t have the confidence I need that my report is safe. This is where I feel WG still has a role to play: it could provide the quality assurance that in a particular report setup, what you intend is what you get. In this way, users wouldn’t have to worry that some quirk of the report creation process isn’t leaving big, or even little holes, in the output. Finally, I understand that others, perhaps also feeling that the printed output of their work does not have an outlet entirely to their satisfaction, have turned to electronic alternatives. John Cardinal’s Second Site is a really excellent interpretation of TMG data and produces a good looking and flexible result. But there is still a part of me that is wedded to hard copy as an extra security against the future change. All original sources are based in hard copy even if some of them have been now been digitised. Without a doubt, there are problems with hard copy (the quality of the paper, the ink and the cost for a start). But I still want the option in TMG and the present options are good but not yet good enough, for me; but they could be. The Encyclopaedic Report would benefit and interest all users not just those with large databases.

Cheers Terry, I'll need a day to get my thoughts together Nick

First of all, thanks for your comments, Terry. QUOTE Maiden aunt Coreen does appear as the child of her parents Andrew and Gertrude but the filter ("surname comes after Ci and before Cz") does not seem to find her and so she does not have an entry in her own name. She doesn't appear because you cannot create a Descendant's Journal for a person with no children - try it for her individually and you will get an error message. I've asked that this be fixed, but so far it has not been. I knew I would trip over somewhere; I obviously ran Journal reports on the married examples! Individually, some of the points I have made could be argued over but when taken together they seem to form a major barrier to passing one's research out. I would like WG to consider this topic seriously. (And it would be really nice if the indexes across a set of reports could be integrated, perhaps as parts of book 1 ...12 &c). I have attempted to breakdown the descendant reports by generation but I think that these too can become hard to read with more generations. Nick (I am not sure that I have the hang of using quotes in this forum!)

This is a Book Manager report: I have recently run two 'books' each of 17 consecutive journal reports. In the first book, all went without a hitch for two thirds of the way through until an error message 'variable 69 not found'. Pressing the ignore option led to 'conversion error#3: could not create or open conv_log.txt on scratch drive' but accepting this I could go on with the journal sequence. I have not found any errors in the journals reports as a consequence of this. Before completing the sequence of journal reports I received the Word link screen on the first and only report which contained exhibits although screen messages were set to off. In spite of these messages, the book of reports seemed to complete okay In the second book, all went well until the penultimate report when the report kept cycling through the analysis notification window on the far right of the screen and it could not reach the 'calculating text' stage. Ctrl-Alt-Del was the only way to escape from this endless cycle. The same result was experienced when running this particular report manually. The report following this in the sequence, when performed manually, went okay. So it would appear that one report, although appearing okay, has somehow become corrupted. It is available if anyone is interested in it. Nick Shelley

I am sure that I am missing something obvious ...! I have created a custom witness sentence to a death tag designed to show an early child death in the parents' narrative. The sentence structure is: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:][PF] <only lived to be [A] and >died <[D]>. The father in this case had two sons by his first marriage, both of whom died young, as did his first wife. Both children have full birth dates and full death dates, viz. Thomas born May 30 1770, died Jan 21 1771, and Sampson born Sep 8 1772 and died Mar 6 1780. In each case these tags are primary. However the father's narrative reads: "Thomas died on Jan 21 1771 ... Sampson only lived to be 7 and died on Mar 7 1780" How can they give different outputs? Nick Shelley

Having had this occur a number of times, I could not understand why the problem stopped. However have just solved it: when editting the path for the report, to get out of the field I have been clicking on what I thought was a neutral part of the background canvas. I realise now that the long strips of background canvas both above and below the path window respond to a mouse click as if one were selecting the screen or printer options by selecting their buttons. Nick

I have now noted another habit of the Journal report. This occurred when making a new report and copying the settings of a first report to it. The output setting was already set to file, and after editting the file name, I then went to amend the focus ID#. Immediately after I entered a new number, the output setting changed to printer. Nick

Neil, The option to select or deselect witness sentences can be found on the Tag tab when you fire up Options for each report Nick Shelley

Yes, I've had this crop up in the past although I think the problem went away with a subsequent upgrade of TMG. I think that I sorted them out by managing to change one (perhaps the date) so that they were for some odd reason no longer attached to one another but as it is so long since I had to do this, I cannot remember anymore, I'm afraid. Nick Shelley

This is just a bug report: I have discovered in TMG 6.12 that, if my printer setting in a Journal report is already set to a particular printer plus A4 page size, if I change this to the Windows default printer (here an HP printer defaulted to A4 paper size) and save this, the printer setting will alter the setting to the letter page size. This occurs without there being any visible change in the printer settings window to the letter option at the time of the change to the Windows default printer. If I go back and change the page size from letter to A4 and save it, the setting is then properly remembered. This is repeatable. Nick Shelley

In a Descendant Indented Narrative report, for example, if you set the narrative memo to a non-proportional font like Courier, what controls the font for the included Endnote memos or citation details? Nick Shelley

I have since realised that the Citation Detail now has its own memo field which I have never used as I have been importing my project from 4.0d. So in this description below, when I talk about the CD memo field I must really be talking about the CD itself? Problem 1: The reason why I asked this question was this: when I have raw unanalysed information, say the contents of a will or an inventory of someone's estate made for probate, I tend to put this in the citation detail where it prints out in the Endnotes (as [CD]). Occasionally some of this info needs a columnar or tabbed arrangement (as you might get when a list of objects is made and their value is shown at the right side of the page). Someone helpfully suggested that if you wanted a columnar setting use a non-proportional font like Courier. That's fine if you are using the normal Memo field but my interest was in the citation detail field. So far as I can see, setting the memo field font to Courier in the report definition does not affect the citation detail font. However I can, in my Source Type definitions, specify that the [CD] field is turned to the Memo field font using the printer control [fontM:]text[:FONTM] but this approach forces all my memos in a report and all my [CD] fields of one Source Type (say, Probate inventory) to adopt the Courier font whereas I really only want to turn on the Courier font on those occasions when a columnar output is needed and here only in the CD. Any ideas? Problem 2: I have been experimenting with the [fontM] option in the Source Type definition for the probate inventory source but it does not seem to have any effect on the print out of the endnote. The Source Type endnote sentence reads: Probate inventory for the estate of [iTAL:][TESTATOR][:ITAL] was proven at [REGISTER] on [COMPILE DATE]{<: [iTAL:][fontM:][CD][:FONTM][:ITAL]>}<. (Extracted by [sOLICITOR], [sOLICITOR LOCATION]).> So I must assume that this printer code does not work in the Source Type sentence or that the introduction of a specific CD memo field has changed how things should be approached. Instead I put these printer codes round the CD text for the specific inventory tag but this too seems to have no effect on the print out. What am I doing wrong? Nick Shelley

I would be grateful for some help on a new problem. I have several printers run using a printer server. The Windows default printer is an A4 HP Deskjet and my descendant indented report's printer setting was set to the Windows default. But a trial report printed to my A3 printer. I checked the Windows default and that is still accurate. So instead I changed the printer setting explicitly to the A4 printer and saved it. When I opened the report again, it was now set to the A3 printer instead. After trying this several times and getting the same results I was going to delete the report until I realised that it was the default printer style for descendant indented charts. Instead I created a new report by first changing the old one to A4 printing and then generated a new report based on that setting. When I opened this new report, the printer was set to the Wholly Genes pdf printer! However changing the printer setting back to the Windows default and instantly printing did confirm that the A4 printer would print after the report was presented to the screen. But going back to this new report after this print out, the printer has reset itself to the pdf printer again. What on earth is going on? Normally when things start getting rather silly, I reindex, optimise and, if that doesn't work, validate the project. (I should add at this point that I have just upgraded from TMG 6.07 to 6.12). When I ran the validation, TMG reported over 18,000 errors corrected. I suspect this latter finding is not significant but ... Guidance please! Nick Shelley

Thanks for your comments, Jim Having now had the time to check, another pre-saved indented report works fine so it is beginning to look as if it is the initial report that is corrupted and that the copy I made copied the corruption. If I take one of my pre-saved versions and make it into a vanilla version will this be identical to the default version, ie: is there anything special about the default reports which marks them as different from later saved versions? Nick

As my report outputs grow in size, Word has given up on me and refuses to play ball. However Adobe Reader is still hanging in there and will read everything in the pdf report which TMG creates ... except for the fact that none of the exhibits (here, images) are included. Is there any chance that a future pdf printer driver will support this feature? Nick

Hmmm! Thanks, Jim I think I understand the distinction! Although as the pdf driver is receiving its input from some sub-program, what a shame it can't be given the odd image to play with. By the way, I tried rtf and after an hour or so, the report crashed (although TMG didn't). Thanks anyway Nick

Jim, Is this a technical issue that images are not sent to pdf or something that simply could be altered by ticking a different box? Nick

Has anyone come across any concerns about the Subject ID# setting in Descendant Indented Narrative Reports not sticking in saved reports? This seems to happen to me a lot and totally undermines the use of Book Manager to complete a series of reports automatically. I am still unsure what process is required to trigger it but I have in the past had numerous error messages arising when using Book Manager and I am wondering if the unstable subject issue is to do with them. Something is not quite right: I decided to do a trial to see if I could trigger a ID# change. I took two of my pre-existing Descendancy Indented Narrative reports, changed their output file name and put them into a specific book called Subject stability test. I then ran the book. The results were as follows: Trial 1: The first report completed but at the end an error message indicated that 'variable 288 is not found' (Help does not recognise this). Given Cancel/No option, I chose 'cancel' but TMG took this as the message to close the whole project and asked me if I wanted to backup the project! 'Cancel' cycled in a loop. 'No' gave me the error message 'unknown member ROTOOBARMAN' and further 'Cancel/Ignore' options would not get me out of this. In the end I had to Ctrl-Alt-Del and even then Windows gave me a separate error message. Trial 2: I restarted TMG and ran the the first report on its own to check that there was no bug in the report itself. It worked fine. I then ran the book report again having checked that the ID# setting in the two reports had not changed (they hadn't). Both reports ran to completion but both gave the Word 'Link' message for exhibits when screen messages are meant to be ignored. Both required that I press OK before the Book Manager could continue. Why did this second run through work whilst the first had not? The main change that I could think of was that in the first trial I had set up a new book report. Also that the output files had not previously existed whereas in the second report the output files had to be overwritten (which I had already preset within Book Manager). Trial 3: To check whether overwriting the output files was a factor, I deleted the existing output files but it made no difference, the book report went through as in Trial 2. Conclusions: there is/are something(s) independently wrong in Book Manager, Also I was unable to find the event which triggers the Descendancy Indented Narrative report ID# change. To save me hours of playing around, does anyone already know about this error anyway? On thinking again about these two issues: the error messages in Book Manager and the slippage of ID# settings in the Descendancy Indented Narrative Reports, it is possible that the latter are being generated by Book Manager's problems rather than the other way round. For, even if the ID#'s for the reports are being changed, that should not by itself cause an error message, you would just get an inaccurate report. I have about 36 pre-saved Descendancy Indented Narrative reports which I have tried to automate in Book Manager by running them in sequence as a 'book'. Checking them today, I noticed that since October when I last had to individually check each subject ID# and then run them all, all of the ID#'s had changed. In almost all cases, the ID#'s had changed by 4 digits (just at this moment I can't remember if the new, wrong, numbers were larger or smaller), but what I mean is that the numbers changed for example from 2042 to 2046. Nick Shelley

Happily, Jim It would be useful to know when Book Manager is working well as it is a feature that I would wish to use regularly Nick

While I struggle to insert new research information into TMG, ensure that tag sentences print out with a bearable level of sense and clarity, check for double commas and grammatical errors, prepare reports for friends or fellow researchers and occasionally wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been tempted into this activity without a government health warning some 12 years ago, I am becoming increasingly consumed by one thought … when I am old and grey, how am I going to pass on all this research for family and future researchers of family history? The difficulty of finding an acceptable set of answers nags at me increasingly day by day. After all what is the good of committing so much time and trouble on my research if it will have little more permanence than my own self? Thus I am thinking of leaving the totality of my research to a national genealogy society and perhaps our local archive office. How difficult can that be? At the moment, the issues centre around finding satisfactory ways of leaving behind the genealogical text-based data, the described and associated exhibits (for me, mostly images) and the charts. The text-based data a) Which reports to use One of the unique strengths of a genealogy program is that it orders people and the information about them in generational sequence and thus provides a visible structure of the relationship between peers and relatives. It makes sense therefore to prepare Descendancy Narratives (others prefer the Journal format) based upon the main families and branches that one has researched. For me this involves 36 family names and therefore 36 Descendancy Narrative Reports. These can be individually saved and put together within Book Manager and generated in one go. [unfortunately, I am experiencing a bug in the Descendancy Narrative reports which changes their Subject focus over time as well as a bug in Book Manager which generates strange error reports so these presently undermine the value of the Book Manager. Instead the reports have to be individually checked that the Subject focus is still accurate and then individually generated.] This approach has much to be said for it but it falls short because it does not include one’s research into (i) other families with the same name who may well turn out to be part of the main ancestral tree but who have not yet been connected (ii) families closely associated with one of one’s own but who are not direct ancestors but who are intimately connected with them and reveal important aspects of one’s own history (iii) individuals who appear or reappear in family events (pictures, documents, witnesses) who are either relations but of unknown linkage or are people of family importance (iv) censuses, companies, houses, cars and other historically associated subjects which do not find a linkage within a Descendancy Narrative report Alternatively, lacking the genealogical structuring of the Descendancy Narrative but nevertheless capable of providing complete coverage of the subject matter within a TMG project, the Individual Narrative can be applied to all subjects in one report. This is the nearest that TMG comes to a paper backup of its contents. Practically easy to set up, the whole-project Individual Narrative quickly hits a brick wall if you print to a Word document. Although TMG happily completes its construction of the document file, Word will not open it once it has grown to even a quite modest file size. However by some jiggery pokery I have been able to surmount this problem by printing to html files first. Doing this, four separate files are created, one each for the text proper, endnotes, bibliography and table of contents. But if you need to do any extensive editing then you may not think of html as the most flexible of vehicles to use. The jiggery pokery part is the fact that when you print to an html file, the separate text, endnotes, bibliography and table of contents files are then linked together by hyperlinks. This reduces overall file sizes. Now, even though Word baulks at opening even relatively small doc files, it is happy to import quite large html files. These, when imported, can then be saved in Word format. In this way large Word files can be created (at least up to 80MB if you also save images inside the file) which now Word happily opens and closes at will. Another advantage at least to me although I know others will not necessarily agree is that the four files, once transformed into doc files and their hyperlinks globally changed to reflect the change of file format from htm to doc, now hyperlink to each other. I find this much easier to use. So when you are looking up a reference in the main text, instead of trawling laboriously through the document’s bowels for the endnote, the hyperlink immediately opens up the Endnote file and takes you directly to the particular reference. Clicking on the endnote takes you back to the original text. Although the translation of html to doc files is time consuming and a fast computer really helps, I was very pretty happy with this compromise. Until summer this year, that is, when I hit a new limitation in Word which I think is due to the number of endnotes that it will support (somewhere between 30,000 - 56,000). In the summer, Word stopped fully importing my html files and my happiness stopped. Alternatives: one of the advantages of both the Individual and the Descendancy Narrative Reports is that they fully support endnotes, bibliographies and tables of content as well as exhibits. (Although I cannot at present find any table of contents in my Descendancy Narratives to Word although maybe I am doing something wrong). However I have discovered that Adobe’s pdf file format does not seem to suffer the same restrictions as Word (above) and will hoover up everything thrown at it – except the exhibits. Printing to pdf, like to html, creates files for text, endnotes and bibliography but a table of contents is not generated. Editing pdf files however seems difficult or else I haven’t got the hang of it. Pdf format does have one other advantage over Word: for some reason the option to create a new page for each new person in an Individual Narrative Report for many people works in Adobe Reader but there appears to be another bug because it doesn’t in Word. The limitations of the printer drivers for different word processors are not created by TMG. But for larger projects, these limitations seem to me to provide serious impediments to the printing and externalisation of the one’s research. There is a possible way round the problems above but I have not yet thought how to achieve it. This might be to flag up all the people who are reflected in the set of family-based Descendancy Narratives. Those not flagged are then the remaining group whose details are not reported. This smaller set might then be made the focus for a grouped report of Individual Narratives. This set of dual reports should then represent a full coverage of a project’s contents. How to export them A problem that I did not originally envisage arises from the practical issue of how many pages do you have to print in the above exercise? My most recent pdf attempt contains the Individual Narratives of all people in the project. Creating separate files for text, endnotes and bibliography but lacking any inclusion of exhibits or a table of contents, the file sizes are: text file: 7883 pages, bibliography file: 246 pages; endnote file: 2797 pages – a total of 10,926 pages. It would be significantly larger with the pictures. This is still a serious amount of printing which would stretch a laser printer although it could be printed in duplex. Forget about an inkjet – you might not live long enough to see it finish. An alternative way of exporting these details is through John Cardinal’s Second Site which creates a web-site format. There is probably a way of printing the pages thus generated but I have not explored this. This will show text, exhibits and bibliography but not the all-important endnotes. The exhibits (here, images) The topic of exhibits remains a problem in TMG. It is not possible to print these out fully and in spite of their equal status as markers of events of historical interest, they are not accorded the same level of data recording as other events are through their tags. People have tried different ways of getting more images into their reports but at present TMG does not support witnesses or event/source/repository exhibits in a satisfactory way. Although TMG does provide an Exhibit Log, I would like to see this developed into a more fully fledged Exhibit Manager. This would allow for more formal recording of different aspects of the exhibit (eg: if of images: their content, type of image, photographer, place, date, sort date, witnesses, size and so on). Images could then be sorted on these fields for comparison and grouping. At the same time, the Exhibit Manager could act as the basis for the generation of a paper-based report format attached to and within pre-existing reports. Whilst Wholly Genes would perhaps want to franchise out exhibit manipulation and editing facilities to a third party, I would argue that TMG would be greatly enhanced by the addition of a genealogy-focused album manager which combines both images and their descriptions within their genealogical framework. One output of the Exhibit Manager might be the generation, at the end of an Individual Narrative or Descendancy Narrative report, of an album of images relevant to that report, which is printable, and which can show the research details of each picture to a flexible degree. There are hundreds of album-creating programs available but none of them, as far as I know, link research detail with their image and with their genealogy. The development of such a facility within TMG would I believe put TMG well ahead of the competition and would raise the status of the image as a serious focus of genealogical research. As part of the management of images, I would like to see the Exhibit Manager provide the researcher with facilities for simultaneous comparison of pictures so that details relevant to the determination of date, place or person identification can be better ascertained and edited. Often one is left with pictures of uncertain people taken in uncertain places at uncertain times and only intensive inspection and comparison can help throw light on their identification. I would argue that such an Exhibit Manager would then complete a comprehensive framework committed to outputting valuable research material in a form that can be archived, saved and shared for the future. I have recently discovered that in England the Society of Genealogists no longer wishes to receive research material in program-dependent form; it has become too troublesome and time consuming to manage. Over and above that, there are serious concerns about the length of time different media of electronic data storage will keep their integrity. One of TMG’s core strengths is its emphasis upon serious and well-documented historical research. The absence of a way of completely printing and publishing what must be for many people the work of many years if not a lifetime into an enduring format which is program and computer independent is, I believe, an undermining element of this excellent philosophy. My apologies for the length of this article. I have posted it both on the TMG list and on the Wholly Genes Community web-site as I have no idea who uses which and why. Nick Shelley

Can anyone tell me what happens to the table of contents (when chosen) in a Descendant Indented Narrative report when sent to Word? It does not appear 'naturally' as the Bibliography and Endnotes do and when I ask Word to create one, whether I pre-select the text of not, it tells me that no table of contents entries were found. Am I doing something wrong or is there a bug? Nick Shelley

Many thanks, Vera, that's super! I wasn't aware of the final options stage Nick