Michael Hannah

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,

I use a custom tag type in the Death group something like what Terry suggests. The death is "assumed" based on the evidence of a burial. See my "DeathAssumeBur" custom tag type: http://www.mjh-nm.net/TAGCUSTM.HTML#BurialTag Hope this gives you ideas,

Pete, I have the old installer file for Version 7.04 Gold US edition. Let me know if your registration key is for that version and you want it. But I agree with Terry that instead you should try to buy a Version 9.05 registration key while you still can.

Bertho, Since you are having problems, instead of trying to click on the email link, use your mouse to hover over the link and it will display Jim's email address. Now simply type that address in as the address for your Outlook mail message.

If you want to specifically place the period, John's idea will probably work. But if you would be satisfied with the output as: "John was big".1 then you could probably simply escape the trailing quote character in the memo like this: "John was big\" I also have not tested this, but believe this will work. This is typically how you get TMG to ignore the trailing character in a sentence when it does its end-of-sentence processing and automatic period and citation reference placement. Hope this gives you further ideas,

If you don't mind creating custom Source Types, you might look at my custom types in my on-line book. I choose to create general purpose types which can be used for a variety of different sources. For the Yearbook maybe my Government Register: For the Application maybe my Government Certificate. Hope these give you ideas,

If this parent is the only parent linked as a parent to these children then I think the following will be simpler. And it will retain any citations or other notes you may have on the parent/child relationship tags, plus any other tags and data about this person. Go to this parent person's Details. Now open each of this parent's children's relationship tag (e.g. Dau-Biological, Son-Biological) Record for later use the ID number of this child. Delete the ID number of the parent (not the child, the parent) from within the Parent slot on this tag. Once this is done for all children, double click on the SEX Flag in the Flags window for the parent. Simply change their SEX from M to F. Next, using the '#' (number sign) Menu button, use their ID number to go to the Details window of each of the children in turn. You will see a "Parent-Biological" tag down in the child's Details, and they will no longer have a Primary father. Open that tag and enter the (now female) parent's ID back into the Parent slot on the tag. It will now show as Mother-Biological. Finally, select that tag and press the '*' (asterisk) key to make that tag show as the Primary mother. Do this for all the children. This should keep all the tags and links and everything you have about this person. Probably takes longer to write this down than to do it. Unfortunately, if you already had linked someone as these children's Primary mother, as well as perhaps linked this parent to some female by marriage, you will have a little more work to do. You first will need to unlink that mother so that this (now female) person can be linked as their mother. But the concept is the same. Just delete the links, make the SEX changes necessary, then add the ID links back in to those existing tags where you deleted the link. Hope this makes sense and gives you ideas,

But as the bug "workaround" states, if you change the font size of "Normal" text in your default Word document template to be the same as you are using for your TMG report default, and save that document template, then the next time you produce a report TMG will use that default template. Then following the changed text in that bibliography entry the font will change "back" to the Word default (instead of the TMG default). But since they are now the same, it will look okay and mean you have nothing to "deal" with.

If the source entry near the end of your bibliography includes a change to the font size, your problem may be related to a known outstanding bug about fonts. See the description of the bug and the workaround in my on-line list of outstanding bugs remaining in the final version 9.05 of TMG: Text font does not reset after font change in a Bibliography when output to Word Hope this gives you ideas,

As Jim said, use a List of Events report, which is what I explicitly suggested.

Sorry, I don't know what is wrong. I daily login and check this website from my Android phone. Not sure why an iPhone should be any different. What error message do you get?

I don't know what events the original poster planned to record, but several people believe they have traced ancestors back to times before "AD". As only one example, several chinese families can link to genealogy documentation of heads of the family which go back that far. So this question of being able to enter such dates in TMG is not uncommon, which is I why I have included the customized method for doing so in my book.

There are a few specific known issues with some TMG report generations. More specific information is needed. What TMG reports are you trying to produce, using what output format, and are you creating the file and then printing it or sending it directly to printer?

If you are making copies of the identical exhibit file so that you can have multiple names for the same exhibit, then I would probably label you a splitter. I also think this is unnecessary and generally a bad idea. I prefer to have only one external file for a given exhibit, and then have multiple exhibits pointing to that one file linked to however many people and events desired. Therefore I name the file based on the nature of the exhibit itself rather than what it is linked to. In my mind being able to link multiple exhibits to the same file is the main value of external exhibits. And if you edit or update that one file, as long as you keep the file name the same all the exhibits will now have the updated image. Using your example, if you have a page of a census record which contains multiple families, I would name the file something like "CENS US 1860 Indiana Wells SD8 ED158 pg12A". I would then have an exhibit on each Census event for each family, all of which linked to that one file but each exhibit could have it own separate caption. Even if you want to have multiple Windows file names for the same file for some reason, you can do that in Windows by making a Windows "shortcut" of a different name to the same file without the need to copy the file. However, whether you link a TMG exhibit to the shortcut name or to the actual file name, the Exhibit Log will show that it is a link to the actual file name not the shortcut name. Hope this gives you further ideas,

I don't believe so. It is my understanding that an external exhibit is linked solely based on the filename. Once you change that filename TMG cannot find the file. There are ways to find that filename if it was moved to a different folder, but I know of no way to realize its filename was changed. So unfortunately I believe you must do them individually. To be sure I got them all, I would do them one at a time as follows: delete the TMG link to the external exhibit, rename the file, relink the external exhibit to the new name. Sorry. The most thorough and reliable way I can think of to work through such exhibits is using the Exhibit Log. I would have open both the Windows folder with the exhibit files and the Exhibit Log in TMG. Set the Focus and Types in the Exhibit Log as appropriate, even just using "All Exhibits" and "All Types". Now I would select an exhibit in the Exhibit Log whose name I wished to change and click on the Properties button to popup the Properties subwindow. With that open, I would now change the name of that exhibit in Windows. Now back in the still open TMG Properties window of that exhibit click on the "Load" button. Select the newly named file. That will change the link of that exhibit to that newly named file. There still will be an issue if you have linked the same exhibit to multiple people or events etc. in TMG. If you have done this then each time you rename an exhibit, in the Exhibit Log you will need to right-click on the exhibit just renamed and choose "Refresh all thumbnails". Now only the other exhibits which used to link to this old now-missing name will have a frowny face and you can relink those from their Properties using the "Load" function. Don't be confused that when you open their Properties you still see the correct image. You do not have a link, that is just the old stored thumbnail. Yes, this will be tedious, but can be done. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hmm... Glad you were able to resolve your issue, but as I said: Since it was not the thumbnail, it was probably the link. The other action I should have mentioned to deal with links to external exhibits was to run the maintenance routine "Validate File Integrity" and be sure to choose the option "Search for missing external exhibits". Your symptoms suggest that the external exhibits may have now been stored in a folder different than the one when they were linked. That option, with the appropriate folders specified for searching, would likely have fixed the issue in a single action. Ahem, "shoveling snow", golly, what is that? I seem to vaguely remember that from my youth in Michigan

There probably are many reasons why a thumbnail image can be missing or the link to the image has changed. However, rather than deleting and reinserting, I would first open the Exhibit Log. Next change the Focus to "All Exhibits" and (for images) set the Type to "Image". (Not sure if setting the focus and type is required, but can't hurt.) Now RIGHT-click on any exhibit. Choose the Menu item of "Refresh all thumbnails". If the images still exist at the pathname where they were originally linked then all the thumbnails should now show after this refresh. With the Exhibit Log focus showing "All Exhibits" of type "Image" you can also rather quickly scroll through all your images a page at a time and see if any other images are still missing a thumbnail. Hope this gives you ideas,

Yes, VCF stands for Visual Chart Form.

Dennis, TMG is doing what you yourself have told it to do, even if you do not realize it. These V8 folder names are stored as part of the project Preferences itself, and you must manually change them yourself. For further discussions on all the things you need to do when upgrading to a new version of TMG, I highly recommend reviewing Terry's TIps on this topic here. Hope this gives you ideas,

Bill, As Jim mentioned you need to delete recreate the index files for the repeat files. As an aid to learning how to do searches the next time, note the following. To do the Search Virginia suggests, you will need to select "The Master Genealogist v9" forum either from the main menu when you enter (or by clicking here) and enter the search term at the top. That will perform the search within that selected forum. That search term will return two previous posts with questions which mention this same error, and provide the same solution Jim gave. Hope this helps,

Yes, "do overs" are easy. Just close TMG if it is open on that project, open SS, select the SS configuration file for your project, (modify the config if you wish), Ctrl-M to remake the files, wait the few seconds it takes, and refresh your browser page to see the changes. Really easy.