Michael Hannah

Just to be doubly sure I understand. You do a backup on your Win7 machine which has TMG V9.05. This creates a .SQZ file. You now get the .SQZ file loaded somehow on your Win10 machine which has TMG V9.05. You then run TMG, ask to do a restore, select the above .SQZ file and you get the error? Or are you doing something different?

I urge you review and follow the suggestions in Terry's Tips about moving TMG to a new Computer here.

Chris, The sort date is the TMG feature explicitly created to deal with situations like this. Where I have a Death date but no known Burial date, I always use whatever I have entered as a date for the Death, even if it is only approximate. The Burial "Date" will be blank, but I will enter in the Burial "Sort Date" whatever is the Date in the Death tag (e.g. "c Jul 1730") but with a question mark '?' appended (i.e. "c Jul 1730?") which will force the Burial tag to sort after the Death tag. The Dates section of the "Data Entry" chapter in my book more fully explains the details of using the question mark as a date modifier. The Sort Date is the essential tool in specifying an order for multiple tags whose Date fields all contain the same date. As examples, see also the Dates section of the "Data Entry" chapter in my book, especially the details of all Sort Date modifiers and their sort order. You might also check out the "Set Sort Dates" feature in TMG Utility to automatically set meaningful Sort Dates for tags whose Dates and Sort Dates are blank. Hope this gives you ideas,

This is a separate pinned topic in this forum. See TMG9 - Final installers (v9.-5)

Sean, If you wish the output to be more similar to what would have output from the List of People report, you can restrict the output to only those tags which are Primary by using additional filter conditions like: ( Principal1... || Primary Marker is || On || OR Principal2... || Primary Marker is || On || ) Note carefully the parentheses which are needed when you ‘OR’ two conditions. Hope this gives you ideas,

Sean, There is also one other consideration. The List of People output column choice is actually specified as: "Marriage Group* Tag; # of Citations" Note it has an asterisk '*' in the name after the word 'Group". That asterisk means the output (if it had worked) would have only given you the number of citations linked to the one tag in the Marriage Group which has been set as Primary for that person. That output would not indicate anything about citations to other tags in the Marriage Group. However, the List of Events report with the filter condition: Tag Type Group is || || Marriage will list all the tags in the Marriage Group which otherwise match any additional filter conditions. Because it will do that it would probably be a good idea to output the Tag Type Label as well. By using the List of Events to output all the tags in the Group you will be better able to see this. The Primary tag might have no citations, while some other tag in the Group may have citations. The List of Events will show that, the List of People would not.

Hmmm... I had not heard of this one before. I will add it to my on-line list of outstanding bugs. --This has now been added with an expanded workaround section. See: List of People report, “Marriage Group* tag; # of Citations” output is wrong

While the company has halted development and no longer supports it, there is a very active e-mail list called TMG-L where many existing users help each other in continued use of this software. If you do purchase a license, see how to subscribe to the list here. Many of us are very happy with TMG, and plan to continue to use it for quite some time, so do our best to support each other in its use.

Or said a slightly different way: TMG's extremely useful feature of Witnesses to tags is a modern enhancement which generally does not exist in other genealogy software. As I mentioned and Jim repeated, TMG has an enhanced option to export information about Witnesses to GEDCOM. But since the very concept of Witnesses is non-standard, this extra information is non-standard GEDCOM, so is generally ignored by most importing software. You have simply encountered one of many enhanced modern features that is standard in TMG (Witnesses) which less featured products and formats like GEDCOM have no way to deal with. You cannot put a gallon of milk (TMG) in a one quart jar (GEDCOM or FTM).

No. The problem is not the tag "type", e.g. Residence. As Jim responded, the problem is that GEDCOM cannot handle witnesses from any tag type. Period. So if a tag has only witnesses it simply will not export at all. GEDCOM is just too old and simplistic. As my chapter mentions, if a tag has "both" Principals and Witnesses, the TMG enhanced GEDCOM export can be used to export some non-standard comments that there are Witnesses, but that is the best TMG can do to try to export "something" about Witnesses in GEDCOM.

As Jim says if any TMG tag has either condition he mentions, then TMG is unable to export anything from such a tag as the very old GEDCOM standard has no mechanism to express such information. I also try to explain that and more in that chapter. This has nothing to do with the "type" of tag, but simply these conditions which might exist for almost any tag type.

For details about GEDCOM export from TMG, see the Import/Export chapter of my on-line book here: http://mjh-nm.net/IMEXPORT.HTML

First, which version of TMG are you using? Since posted in this forum I will assume Version 9.05? Second, how are you observing that these are duplicates? You say that you "find multiple copies of that same tasks in the database in the task list for that person." So I assume that you are simply opening the Research Log for a person, possibly by clicking on the "Tasks" Icon in the menu bar? Are you sure they really are duplicates? When you open the Research Log for a person, select each "duplicate" Task in turn. Note at the top right of the Research Log window is a line "Subject:" with some information about how this Task is linked. Are these duplicates all linked to the same Person, Event, Source, and/or Repository? or are they linked, for example, to multiple different Events which would show as different event numbers? Note that copying a Person, Event, Source, or Repository which already has a task linked to it will cause the linked Task to also be copied. So the copied Task would look like a duplicate, since in effect it is, but it is linked to a different event. Hope this gives you ideas,

Into what folder are you creating the report file? Is it on a removable media, if so try writing it to your main disk. Is it going to a folder which is being monitored by some other program such as an automated backup program like Dropbox, if so that program (sometimes) could be interfering with the writing of the file. Just guesses/ideas to think about.

Optimize, then Verify File Integrity, then Optimize. Optimize will also do a Reindex, so if you Optimize you do not need a separate Reindex. Most of the time the above three steps are sufficient. However in the past if VFI gave any errors, it had been recommended after the second Optimize to rerun first VFI then Optimize. It was suggested to continue that pair until the VFI gave no errors. Probably no longer required, but can't hurt. It is my understanding that it does the whole project, including all datasets. Hope this helps,

Note that you do not need to first install V8 and then "update". That V9 installer is not really an "update". It is complete and will install the full TMG V9 system. You do still have the separate V9 unlock code, right?

As Terry has said, this is a matter of your own documentation standards. For situations like this I choose to leave the citation to various tag to this source, but take one of two actions. Generally I add a note to the CD or CM indicating my conclusion that this is not accurate. In addition I often then use the exclusion feature on these citations so they do not output, but are still there. Too often I come across the same source later and forget I already saw that information. When I go to re-enter it I find the (excluded) citations with their note which saves me from going down that same rat hole again. Hope this gives you ideas,

Not clear what you forgot to make "female"? Do you mean you have a custom tag type, and you created a custom role, and you want to have TMG recognize that this role is only appropriate for females? If so, that is within the Tag Type Definition. Select the role, then towards the bottom of the screen change the "Sex" to Female. This will not prevent you from linking males to this role, it will simply cause TMG to give you a warning if you do. On the other hand, if you are adding this mother to the database and forgot to specify to TMG that she is female, that is easily changed. Go to her Details page, Double click on the SEX flag in her Flags list, and change her from Male to Female. If neither of those are your issue, please explain in more detail what you did and are trying to accomplish.

It is not clear if you need to merge sources or source types, or just redirect the citations to a desired source. John's suggestion may be of help to change all the citations to a single preferred source, but I think? it will leave all those other sources in your Master Source List, now with no citations to them. You might want to review the issues about merging Sources and Source types after an import as described in the "Import/Export" chapter of my on-line book. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hi Judy, For more (gory) details about Font sizes you might look in the "Style" chapter of my on-line book about configuring TMG and review the Fonts topic. However as my notes in that section mention, it does seem that some aspects of the "Tag Entry" do appear to use the default Windows font size. Hope this gives you ideas,

David, As you yourself note "TMG witnesses are part of "enhanced" gedcom from TMG, not 5.5" and as Jim has tried to further explain, the witness concept is foreign to GEDCOM and not a part of its standard. But GEDCOM does define a construct for any non-standard data/text to be included within the GEDCOM file. This construct is what TMG uses to at least output some information about witnesses and other non-standard TMG information. Perhaps some history would help. Note that this enhanced export option was only introduced in V9.04, just weeks before the last TMG version ever to be released. In my opinion it demonstrates the great concern the TMG developers had for its users that their final effort was to try to ensure as much information as possible would be able to be exported from TMG to minimize the loss of all the effort done by the users to enter that data into TMG. While that exported GEDCOM data is non-standard, it has been output in a standardized and consistent fashion. Thus if other programs will add the code to recognize it, they could import it appropriately and prevent it from being lost. At worst most programs will import and store "somewhere" such non-standard data (as you discovered in TNG) so that it can be referred to for whatever manual efforts required to re-introduce the data in the new program. And even if a program does not do that, any GEDCOM file is simply a text file and thus the user can read the file and still have access to that information for manual re-introduction. So, to echo Jim, if your goal is import into TNG, then you need to lobby the developers of TNG to add the code to their program to recognize these non-standard but consistently structured GEDCOM extensions and import its data appropriately. Feel free to point them to my web posts to aid them in understanding what code they would need to create. Hope that helps explain,

Hi David, You are observing the issue that TMG has many more capabilities to identify and link data than the extremely limited decades-old GEDCOM format can possibly handle. As many of us have been saying repeatedly over the years, if you use the features of TMG and then export your TMG to GEDCOM you will lose a lot of data and linkage information. One way to think of this is that you cannot put two gallons of milk in a pint jar. If you pour all your milk into the jar, then when you pour what winds up in the pint jar back into your 2-gallon jug there is only one pint of milk in the bottom. You poured your TMG into GEDCOM and lots spilled over. When you pour it back into TMG it become real obvious what is missing. I have posted two different web pages to try to help explain all of this. One page only talks about GEDCOM export. The link to the discussion of the enhanced GEDCOM Export on that page is here. A separate chapter of my more extensive on-line book about TMG covers both export and import, including export and import of GEDCOM. It contains all of the above page and much more. The link to the portion of that chapter which also discusses enhanced GEDCOM export details is here. Hope this gives you ideas,

Yes, the TMG Utility function to change internal exhibits to external is called "Export Images" and means what it says, it only exports image exhibits. I know of no way to automate changing internal "text" exhibits to external. There are advantages and disadvantages to internal versus external text exhibits, so I would be interested to know your reasons for wanting to change. I have nearly 800 internal text exhibits in my main project, and have even highly customized my Second Site configurations to produce a text gallery similar to an image gallery of these text exhibits. As long as these internal text exhibits are reasonably short, I see no advantage to their being external. If you really want to make this change, I believe you will have to find and open each exhibit, select and copy all the text, paste that into an external editor, save it as a separate file, delete the internal exhibit, and finally link in the external file as the replacement text exhibit. While the Exhibit Log can show you all the text exhibits, if attached to an event tag (which most of mine are) the details in the bottom right corner of the Log only shows an event number. I know of no easy way to find that event based on that number. To get a list of the events which have exhibits you can run a List of Event report, and filter for: Number of Exhibits // > Is greater than // 0 // END If you sort that report by Principal 1 ID number, you could work through these events person by person. But I know of no way to either filter by or identify in the report the "type" of exhibit, so the report will also list all event tags with linked image exhibits. Exhibits can be attached to people, sources, event tags, repositories, citations and place records. Lists for each set of these exhibits can be similarly identified by their appropriate "List of" report with a similar filter, but with the same problem of also including image exhibits. Sorry, but I cannot think of any other simpler way. Maybe some other user will have an idea.

That is very much personal taste. In the case of these documents the real issue probably is how important is seeing the actual document to telling the story of this person? As for scanning, some prefer to scan everything to preserve it as a digital image instead of keeping stacks of paper. Others prefer the paper, and some do both. As for exhibits, some attach all kinds of things as exhibits. My preference is not to bother especially if the actual source is obtainable by others somewhere. So in your case, could some other relative obtain these copies from the college? If so, I wouldn't spend the time either scanning or attaching exhibits, just extract the facts and point to the college archives. But I do often choose to create a full text "transcript" of a document and attach that text using my custom Transcript tag type. For me the important thing is to document where I got a fact from, and clearly identify where/how someone else could obtain the original source themselves, even if it simply identifies where it is located in my own file cabinet. Just my opinion. Hope this gives you ideas,

Bob, When you say you "obtained" these documents from a college, I presume they were stored there? In my mind that would make the college the "Repository" for these sources, not a source itself, as it is the place where these sources can be found. For some background on what is a source and what is a repository I highly recommend reviewing Terry's Tips of Basic Concepts - Sources. For a more detailed discussion of Repositories and how I use them, see that topic in my Source Guide chapter: Repositories. I would consider each document you describe to be its own source for the information it contains, and would use a Source Type for each appropriate to the kind of document it is. As examples, for correspondence I have a custom source type Correspondence for those types of documents. For a list of references or an application I might use something like my general purpose Manuscript source type for documents created by a person. And if all else fails, I always have my Miscellaneous source type as a "catch all" for any documents which don't seem to fit anything else. Hope these give you ideas,