bienia

I use two tags for obituaries, one for the obituary and a separate one for the text obituary. These are my versions of obit tags based on a number of on-line examples. Here is the Obit tag I'm using: [:CR:][:TAB:]<[D],> [RF:Deceased]'s obituary appeared in the newspaper < [L]> <. It listed [R:Survivors] as surviving the deceased><. The obituary listed [R:Preceded] as preceding [RM:Deceased] in death> <. [M]> I also have an Obit-txt tag that ony has [M] as the sentence structure. The role sentences are: Deceased: [:CR:][:TAB:]<[D],> [RF:Deceased]'s obituary appeared in the newspaper < [L]> <. It listed [R:Survivors] as surviving [RM:Deceased]> <. The obituary listed [R:Preceded] as preceding [RM:Deceased] in death> <. [M]> Survivors: [RF:Deceased]'s obituary <[D]>< in the newspaper [L]> listed [R:Survivors] as surviving [RM:Deceased].<[M0]> Preceded (male version): [:CR:][:TAB:]While he died before [R:Deceased], his name ([R:Preceded]) was listed in [RF:Deceased]'s obituary <[D]> <[L]>.<[M0]> Preceded (female version): [:CR:][:TAB:]While she died before [R:Deceased], her name ([R:Preceded]) was listed in [RF:Deceased]'s obituary <[D]> <[L]>.<[M0]> Note: I added the CR/TAB to the Preceded to it would be output as a separate paragraph after the body of the narrative for the person. Here is an example of the output. On 20 Feb 1908, Flora's obituary appeared in the newspaper Acton Free Press, Acton, Ontario. It listed her daughter Mrs. (Capt) [Eliza] Curry, her son-in-law, J.A. Tracy and her son, Mr. C. G. Murray as surviving her. The obituary listed her father, Capt. Alex. McNab, her first husband, Richard Tracy Esq., Col. Murray and Miss [Mary Jane] Tracy as preceding her in death. Flora's obituary read: "Flora's onituary read:" is the start of the Obit-txt tag output. Any comments or suggestions for improvement will be appreciated.

Charles, I support your push to get this feature added to TMG. I empathise with the amount of extra data that is generated for those in the ancestral lines, which are generally the most researched and documented.

cghjr, I just looked at my journal report and the parents were there in both the child list and in the subseqent listing as a parent. Childlist: + 8 vii. Harriet Ann McNab was born circa 1830 in Ontario. She married James A. Miller, son of John Miller and Jennet Chisholm, say 1847 in Canada West. Harriet died on 28 Dec 1905 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was buried in Hillcrest Presbyterian Cemetery, Norval, Halton Co., Ontario. As Parent: 8. Harriet Ann2 McNab (Alexander1) was born circa 1830 in Ontario.90 She married James A. Miller, son of John Miller and Jennet Chisholm, say 1847 in Canada West. Harriet died on 28 Dec 1905 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was buried in Hillcrest Presbyterian Cemetery, Norval, Halton Co., Ontario. There is no checkbox to "Include Parents of spouse in marriages". To be included in the reports, the marriage sentence must include the parents code <[PARO]> as in "[P] married [PO] <[PARO]> <[D]> <[L]> <[M]> <. [M2]>". Check you marriage Tag Type sentences for the roles assigned to the principals, whatever roles they are assigned. The parents are also shown in the Descendant Individual Narrative and in the Individual Narrative, as well as the Ahnentafel, the ancestral narrative report. If the above doesn't reflect what you are trying to accomplish through your query, can you be more specific?

FTM 2008 also lacks many of the features of TMG that require the wide variety of views. The FTM interface is a a combination of workspaces and tabs and views and panels that are essentailly fixed in function and content (except family view edit panel) and to do any work you must flip back and forth and back and forth between these various workspaces and tabs and views. The FTM2008 interface lacks the customizability that TMG offers, it imposes the designers view of what data you need and how to view that data, and it offers none of the efficiency that TMG users get by combining the various views they want to see when doing their work. As Virginia indicated, perhaps you should view some of the layouts TMG users have created that let them see the detail the need and allows them to do their data entry and fine tuning efficiently. Have you contributed your TMG layout to show what you believe is a more effective TMG layout?

Why use roles of Resident and Wife [or Husband as suggested by Teresa] instead of P and PO? Principal: At the time of [M1]< in [Y]>, [PF] <was|and [POF] were> residing <at [DETAIL]>< in [L3], [L4], [L5]> <. [M2][:NP:]> Witness: [W] was residing with [P] <and [PO]> <in [Y]> <at the time of [M1]> <at [DETAIL]><in [L3], [L4], [L5]> <. [WM]> The Witness role [W] can be included in the M2 memo segment to include a list of others residing at the same place. And each Witness has their own sentence using the details from the event tag.

This is my personal favourite feature in TMG v7, since my preference is the Journal-type narrative report and I submitted a request via the TMG Support forum for such a feature. (There were probably a lot of others who also requested a similar feature.) One of the benefits of this feature is that we, as the authors of our family history, can tailor the child sentences so the phrases are not only less repetitive, but we can add additional discussion for clarity. Notes: > Setting up the sentences and determining what to use (number of children, born in, etc., must be done by the user; there is no automation in TMG7.00 - perhaps in a future release. > This feature only works with Primary tags for parent-child relationships. TMG only prints children in the child list with Primary tags. > This feature is not supported in Second Site2.1, but the sentences will appear in a narrative treatment where the sort date places them. If you are planning to use this feature extensively in TMG, do some preliminary testing to check out the results in SS2.1 - a colon ending to a sentence in the middle of a paragraph may seem odd. (Again, perhaps support will come in a future version.) The [NarrativeChildren] tag only works with the Journal report to replace "Children of X and Y". It does not work with any of other narrative-type reports. As a result, one has to generally disable this tag in all other narrative-type reports (if they are used) to suppress the sentences produced, unless you can create a complete sentence that can stand on its own in other narrative type reports and still provide a suitable lead-in to the children of the couple in the Journal report. (I haven't been able to come up with anything myself, and probably won't try.) To suppress this tag from other narrative reports, select Report, [report type], Options, and click on Tags tab. Under Tag Types, click Selected, the click Select All, then scroll down and double-click NarrativeChildren to unselect it, and click OK to close the window, the click Save Settings to save the settings. TIP: The [:NoBirthPlaces:] code can be placed in an optional memo segment so you can add it to the memo without having to modify the local sentence. Note: The [:NoBirthPlaces:] code will appear in the Sentence Preview, but not the Journal report, and as a result the Places in the Children's birth sentences are suppressed. Warning: The [:NoBirthPlaces:] code will suppress the place data whether it is identical in all cases or completely different in all places - the user must ensure it is identical. This is why I have it set in the [M2] memo segment. TIP: I insert a sort date that is a a couple of days after the marriage date so the [NarrativeChildren] tag immediately follows the [Marriage] tag (and [Name-Marr] for women.) While it is not required, it groups them together and gives me a visual timeframe for this tag, rather than being at the top, particularly if there are three or four or even five marriages. TIP: You can use the various P, PF, PG and PO, POF, POG person variables, etc. One thing I like to do is set the Name-Marr with First Name (Maiden Surname) in the Given Names field, i.e. Jane (Doe) and the married surname in the Surname field, i.e. Smith, then choose that name variation “Jane (Doe) Smith” in the Tag Entry window. Role: Principal Sentence: [:TAB:]The <[M1]> children of [P] <and [PO]><, all born in [L]> <, [M2]> were:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1= “#” (of children), “# known”, “known”, “apparent” [Note: # represents a number, which should be written out in text rather than using the Arabic numbers. CMOS, 14th Ed.] M2= Order (“, although the order is uncertain,”, “(ordered per [P1FS] will)” OR other comments M3= [:NoBirthPlaces:] (to suppress birth places in child sentences; enter place in [L] fields) Examples that can be created: The children of John Smith and Jane Doe were: The children of John and Jane (Doe) Smith, all born in Barnet, Vermont, were: The known children of John and Jane (Doe) Smith were: The twelve known children of John and Jane (Doe) Smith (ordered per John’s will) were: The apparent children of John and Jane (Doe) Smith, although the order is uncertain, were: Role: AsFollows Sentence: [:TAB:][PF] <|and [PO]> had [M1] children<, all born in [L]> <, [M2]> as follows:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1= “#” (of children), “at least #”, “# known”, “known”, “apparent” M2 & M3: as above Examples: John Smith and Jane Doe had five children as follows: John and Jane (Doe) Smith had at least five children as follows: John Smith and Jane Doe had five children, all born in Esquesing Twp, Halton County, Upper Canada (now Ontario), as follows: John and Jane (Doe) Smith had five known children as follows: Role: Following Sentence: [:TAB:][P] <and [PO]> had the following <[M1]> children<, all born in [L]> <, [M2]>:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are as above. Examples: John Smith and Jane Doe had the following five children: John Smith and Jane Doe had the following five children, all born in Canada West (now Ontario): Etc. Role: OneChild Sentence: [:TAB:][PF] <and [PO]> had [M1] <born in [L]> <[M2]>:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1= “one child”, “one son”, “one daughter” OR “four sons”, “three daughters”, etc. M2= Order (as above) OR other comments M3= [:NoBirthPlaces:] (to suppress birth place in child sentence; enter place in [L]) Examples: John Smith and Jane Doe had one child: John Smith and Jane Doe had the following five sons: John Smith and Jane Doe had two sons, both born in Chaleur Bay, Lower Canada (now Quebec): John Smith and Jane Doe had three daughters, all born in Chaleur Bay, Lower Canada (now Quebec), order unknown: Etc. Role: OnlyChild Sentence: [:TAB:]The only [M1] of [PF] <and [PO]> <[M2]> was:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1= “child”, "known child", “son”, “daughter”, etc. M2= comments Examples: The only known child of John and Jane (Doe) Smith was: NOTE: The next role, ChldNotInDB, is intended for use when the child(ren) is(are) not in the database Role: ChildNotInDB Sentence: [:TAB:][P] <and [PO]> had [M1]<, [M2]> Where M1= “one child”, “one son”, “one daughter” OR “no children”, “no known children”, “no issue”, “# children” OR “four sons”, “three daughters”, etc. M2= commentary Examples: John Smith and Jane Doe had no known children. John and Jane (Doe) Smith had no children. John and Jane (Doe) Smith had no issue. John and Jane (Doe) Smith had five children, three boys and two girls, all living in 2007. John Smith and Jane Doe had no known children, although there has been little research into this branch of the family by this author. Etc. The following roles are for multiple marriages with children in the database. The SecondMarr_Alt was created to allow variety in the reports between 1st and 2nd marriages. Role: FirstMarr (male) Sentence: [:TAB:][P] had <[M1]> children <with his first wife, [PO]> <, all born in [L]> <, [M2]> as follows:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are per AsFollows role above. Example: John Smith had twelve children with his first wife, Jane Doe, as follows: Etc. Role: FirstMarr (female) Sentence: [:TAB:][P2] had <[M1]> children <with her first husband, [P1]> <, all born in [L]> <, [M2]> as follows:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are per AsFollows role above. Examples: Jane Doe had twelve children with her first husband, John Smith, as follows: Etc. Role: SecondMarr (male) Sentence: [:TAB:][PF] had <[M1]> children <with his second wife, [PO]> <, all born in [L]> <, [M2]> as follows:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are per AsFollows role above. Examples: John Smith had three children with his second wife, Elizabeth Jones, as follows: Etc. Role: SecondMarr (female) Sentence: [:TAB:][P2F] had <[M1]> children <with her second husband, [P1]><, all born in [L]><, [M2]> as follows:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are per AsFollows role above. Examples: Elizabeth Jones had six children with her second husband, James Small, as follows: Etc. Role: SecondMarr_Alt (male) Sentence: [:TAB:][PF] <and his second wife, [P1]> had the following <[M1]> children<, all born in [L]><, [M2]>:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are per AsFollows role above. Examples: John Smith and his second wife, Elizabeth Jones, had the following three children: Etc. Role: SecondMarr_Alt (female) Sentence: [:TAB:][P2F] <and her second husband, [P1],> had the following <[M1]> children<, all born in [L]> <, [M2]>:[:NP:]<[M3]> Where M1-M3 are per AsFollows role above. Examples: Elizabeth Jones and her second husband, James Small, had the following six children: Other ideas Possessive [:TAB:][PF] <and [POS]> [M1] children were:[:NP:] will result in John and Jane (Smith) Doe's twelve children were: A variation could use parentheses rather than commas as in: [:TAB:][PF] <|and [PO]> had [M1] children <(all born in [L])> as follows:[:NP:]<[M2]> To give John and Jane (Smith) Doe had twelve children (all born in Esquesing Township) as follows: Other sentence ideas "John Smith and Jane Doe apparently [or probably or likely] had the following children:" "John Smith and Jane Doe had a blended family of 11 children (John brought 3 children from his first marriage and Jane brought 4 from her previous two marriages.) Together they had four children as follows:" "John and Jane (Doe) Smith had seven children, two of whom were adopted (Lyman and Penelope) as follows: [Note: the adopted children may or may not be shown in the child list depending on whether the relationship was set to Primary.]" Suggested by Jill Morelli "According to the 1930 census, Jane Smith had given birth to 7 children, 5 of whom were still living. The four known children of John and Jane Smith were as follows:.." From Terry Reigel: [if a couple had children, but] you don't enter their children, you would automatically get a statement that they had no children. The NarrativeChildren tag offers you the opportunity to change that statement to something more accurate, for example: "There were three children of X and Y, who are not identified here." "No research has been done to determine whether there were any children of X and Y." "The children of X and Y were W, X, and Z, who are not further described here." I'm sure some clever folks can come up with better statements than these. Terry Reigel ______________ I trust you have plenty of other ideas for sentences. Please share your ideas…

The ratio of space allocated to the sentence structure (top) to the sentence preview (bottom) seems lopsided (about 2/3 to top and 1/3 to bottom). The top portion contains variables that expand into longer, sometimes much longer, sentences. However, the size of the top area is greater than the bottom. Because of the lopsided ratio, even expanding the window fails to display the whole sentence in the preview area unless the window is expanded a great deal, while the top sentence structure has oodles of white space. Perhaps in a future update, the size of the two areas could be set up reversing the current ratio (1/3 to sentence structure and 2/3 to sentence preview), or separated by a widget to let users change the ratio based on their needs. Bill Bienia

Just a note to provide the benefit on some early testing with joyous then disappointing results - and a lesson. I thought I found a terrific idea for using the [+] code. I have Name-marr tags for all the women in my database. My brainstorn was to use the [+] code in the sentence for the Name-marr Principal role to concatenate the married name sentence to the marriage sentence. I changed the sentence to read: [+] and used the married name, [N] <[M]> Create an Individual Narrative report. The new sentences concatenated as anticipated. Check out the Descendant Narrative report. OK too. Check out the Individual Detail and the FGS and the Ahnentafel. I'm onto something here. Or was I? In the Ahnentafel report, I noticed another person who had data in their memo field creating a longish sentence, and the concatenation wasn't very practical there. "How do I resolve this" I thought. Create two tags Name-marr (using the original sentence structure) and Name-marr2 (using the new structure.) Check the Narrative reports, great. Check the Journal report. It's not where it should be. It was no longer with the marriage sentence, but off in the middle of nowhere in the next paragraph. Why? Journal reports put the BMDB details in the opening paragraph by default. Lesson: Don't use the [+] to concatenate sentences onto BMDB sentences, since these sentences are placed in the first paragraph in the Journal report, but appear in chronological sort order in other reports. (Unless you are not going to use Journal reports.) Died and Burial may be logical sentences to concatenate, as long as the sort date is used to ensure they appear one after the other. Note: Since I haven't used Second Site yet (just bought it and I'm waiting for the new TMG7-compatible version), any constructs using the [+] must also be checked out with this program.

Embellishing the Wish List for improvements beyond v7.00 The Individual Detail report currently only gives the tag and witness data for the subject, which includes birth data on children and marriage to spouse(s) and divorce if the subject is entered as one of the principals. I would like to have TMG produce a more detailed Chronology for an individual. The Individual Detail report with the addition of an age column and improved child descriptions, i.e. Son-Birth, Dau-Marriage, etc., would be a first step. The age column (3 digits) could be a report option, that would insert it between the date and the details (similar to the age option in the Person View.) The current report shows life span of parents, but not their marriage. This could be added (perhaps optionally) to the Father line at the top of the report. I would like to expand this and include Divorce as well (perhaps in the same option as the marriage.) If a particular Divorce should remain hidden, that tag should be be set to exclude (or always exclude) it. The options to show excluded data or show sensitve data are already in place. The report would require the addition of the marriage and death of children (births are shown but not labeled as such) that occur within the life time of the subject. Births of chidlren are already shown in the report, and controlled by the Child Tags option in the Miscellaneous tab. I would suggest options to select either child Births (current data) or child BMDs. Spousal events like Divorce would appear there if both Principals are entered for the tag. Death of a spouse should be shown as well. (I have a widow/widower role which adds this data in a round about way - perhaps this is sufficient.) The current details are terse because only the tag name and role names are shown along with the names of people (spouse, children), and place. Many of the details are included in the Memo field, which is not shown. Perhaps an option to show [M] or [M1] would help to provide details. I hesitate to suggest to allow the user to select and of the [M1] to [M9] memos, but this may be an option that could be considered. This complete report would provide a unique analysis tool for the life events that occured within the lifetime of the subject. Some such as death of a spouse or a child, or marriage of a child, could help explain turning points in a person's life.

If you have documents for both events, then you would record both events in TMG, and use notes (in memos) to explain circumstances. This is a perfect place for the new [+] code to concatenate the two tag sentences, but retain separate sources for each. If there was an intervening tag (for whatever reason) use the sort date to place the two tags in chronological order. You have have to modify the start of the annulment tag to something like "[+] and was annulled..." to remove the principal names and allow the sentences flow into one another. I recently read of a case where a couple eloped since the bride was under age, her father found out, found and brought his daughter home, and had the marriage annulled. (Note that you cannot simply record the tags and insert the double exclusion marker "--" (no quotes) at the beginning of each sentence, to make these events disappear from all of your reports. You will see the tags on screen, and in some reports like the FGS, but not in other reports like the Individual Narrative.)

Here is the layout I've settled on for the time being, employing the new Associates window. I'm not using focus groups (yet) so I don't show that window.

The child/children sentence is probably the only sentence structure (that I know of) in TMG that is not accessible, or changable, from within TMG, making it the single most repetitive construct in a TMG narrative report. There are two external methods of changing the sentence, 1) using the TMG Language feature, and 2) modifying the output in a word processor. Neither provides a flexible solution to this issue. The first method only changes the sentence from one fixed form to another, which doesn't change the repetitive form of the sentence. The word processor option allows the user to control the the final output, but doesn't offer the flexibility of tag sentence structures to capture the desired output within TMG so extensive editing is not required in the word processor, a prime benefit touted for the flexibility of global and local control over the sentence structure in TMG. Modifying it in the word processor means that it is not stored within TGM and therefore has to be re-edited every time the report is generated taking quite a bit of time and effort each time. I suggest that the "children" sentence structure be brought into TMG proper so the flexibility of the sentence can be set up by the user, just as any other sentence. However, just as the other "tags" have default structures, the "children" sentence should as well, and the ones currently provided should remain so the new feature doesn't "break" what people had before, i.e. the two sentences, one for those families with children and and one for those without any. Several enhancements for this new feature would be: a) to provide a variable that calculates the number of children (Note: The Chicago Manual of Style shows to use words rather than numbers); to provide a variable that would include the place of birth of the children, if they were all born in the same identical place. (Baptism or christening should be substituted if there is no birth data for any of the children.) there was no birth data) A bonus option would be to the option to use an abbreviated state or province name, rather than the full state/province name; c) to use variables for principals, i.e. [P1] & [P2], or [P] and [PO], as well as [PF], [PG] with the option to select names from the name box as in other tags; d) the option to include "son/sons" or "daughter/daughters" if the children were all of the same sex. e) the ability to have separate child lists of adopted children, if desired This would allows us users to create sentences such as: "John Smith and Jane Doe had at least twelve children as follows:" "John Smith and Jane Doe had no issue." "Jane Doe and John Smith had ten children (ordered per John's will) as follows:" "The children of John Smith and Jane Doe were:" "John Smith and Jane Doe had fourteen children (all born in Erin Township, Gore District) as follows:" "The twelve children born to John Smith and Jane Doe were:" "John and Jane apparently had the following children:" "John and Jane Smith had seven children, all born in New Haven:" "Jane had a questionable child in Vermont:" "John and Jane had a daughter:" "John and Jane Smith had four sons, all born in Chicago:" "John Smith and Jane Doe had three adopted children:" "The children of John Smith with Jane Doe were:" followed by their child list then by "The children of John Smith with Mary White were:" and their child list "Children of John and Jane (Doe) Smith, order uncertain, were:" "Only child of John Smith, born Salem, Mass., was:" "The children of John and Jane (Doe) (McIlwain) Smith, all baptised in Montreal, Quebec, were:" Thank you for considering this request. Bill Bienia, Billsburgh, Ontario, Canada

Katrina, You could create a second "pseudo plural" (Terry Reigel's term) role for multiple family members called [R:Family Members], with the same sentence structure as [R:Family Member], and then change the last part of the principle sentence to: ... <Also included on the passenger list was [R:Family Member].> <Also included on the passenger list were [R:Family Members].> <[M]> By doing this, if you have one other family member, you would use the [R:Family Member] role, for two or more, use the [R:Family Members] role for each family member. Either way the resulting sentence reads correctly.

I would like to have TMG generate a Chronology report. The report is basically for one particular subject, but would include key events (birth, marriage, divorce, death, to name a few) in the lives of children, spouse, parents, and grandchildren that occur within the life time of the subject. Births of chidlren are already a tag within the subjects list of tags.) Optimally, I could select children's BMDD, children's spouse's BMDD, parent's marriage or remarriage, divorce or death, grandchildren's BMDD. Allowing users to pick other people to include would add an extra level of functionality, similar to including History tags in the person's life, but for people. This report would provide a unique analysis tool for following the life events that occured within the lifetime of the subject. Some such as death of a spouse, marriage of children or birth of grandchildren can help explain why people were where they were. The format would be tabular, similar to the Individual Detail report, but with the addition of an age column. The Individual Detail report currently only gives the tag and witness data for the subject, which includes birth data on children and marriage to spouse(s) and divorce if entered with two principals. None of the variables in tag sentences are substituted, and none of the other information is available. If there is such a report or list that will provide that information in the appropriate format, I would appreciate hearing about it. If not, I hope the developers will consider this for a future release. Thanks, Bill Bill Bienia Hillsburgh, Ontatio, Canada www.CobblestoneLegacies.com

I'm just starting to use TMG. Is there a way to change the sentence that says, "Children of John Smith and Jane Doe were as follows:"? Is there a way to include the number of children in the sentence? Can the number be conditional so that for 5 or more children it reads one way and for 1-4 it reads another way. Secondly, is there a way to make the sentence structure conditional depending on whether both parties are still living? Lastly (for now), can the default sentence when there are no children be changed? Thanks, Bill