Michael Hannah

No, many of us consider that our current TMG program will work just fine on present and future computers for at least ten and probably many more years. The only "difficult situation" that I see is for other genealogists who don't already have TMG not being able to purchase it. Like Terry, I recommend sticking with TMG until other genealogy programs "catch up" to the existing capabilities of TMG. I don't see any current or probable program coming close to its features for many years. As Terry suggested, this is just one opinion. Read Terry's article and make up your own mind.

Dan, Are you really sure you want to do this? Most of us users strongly recommend against such splitting actions. Instead we suggest setting a FLAG to different values for the two groups of people, but leaving them in the same dataset and project so they can share all the same customizations, sources, etc. You may also want to review Terry's Tips about Copying and Moving people. See his web page here. And if you are going to do any merging see his web page on that topic here.

I am guessing that you are entering a negative latitude. TMG needs a preceding "\" in front of the minus sign to distinguish it from an exclusion marker. For further details about entering latitude/longitude values, and TMG's automatic conversion of input values, see the section in the Data Entry chapter of my book here: http://www.mjh-nm.net/DATENTRY.HTML#PlaceLatLong Hope this gives you ideas,

The following is an extract of the Version 8.08 Change Log. In only contains the descriptions of the changes after Version 8.04 up to Version 8.08. As you will see it contains a number of bug fixes which are likely to be of value. Note that Version 8.05 has a change to the way that Role variables are stored internally within the database files. If you use Role variables in tag sentence templates, especially in multiple languages, then I suggest you first read the summary of those changes here. This fix/change resolved some unexpected behavior of Role variables which was first introduced in Version 8 and which you may have come to expect in Version 8.04. To upgrade you simply need a Version 8.08 installer file, but not sure where you can find one now. Maybe some other user can point you to where it can be obtained. Your existing Version 8 registration will be accepted. Hope this helps you decide. I would echo Jim's suggestion to upgrade. Michael ================================== [v8.08.0000] 22 Apr 2013 Bug Fixes Tag Entry - Open a name tag or a relationship tag, click [Tag type], select the same or a different tag type and click [select]. You got: ErrorMarker: Property RNETYPEOLD is not found. 151 FRMTTL.CMDOK.CLICK. Add Tag - Open the Tag Type List from the Add menu or Tag Box toolbar, select a name or relationship tag type and click [select] to add the name or relationship tag to the person. You got: ErrorMarker: Property RNETYPEOLD is not found. 136 FRMTTL.CMDOK.CLICK. Tag Type Definition screen / Roles and Sentences tab - The Principal and Witness roles could be renamed and that should not have been possible. Tag Type Definition screen / Roles and Sentences tab - Some cosmetic changes were made to this screen and to various warning messages. [v8.07.0000] 19 Apr 2013 New Tag Type Definition screen - Four buttons have been added to set thedefault role for principals (or to set the default roles for principal 1 and for principal 2) and to set the default role for witnesses. For standard tag types, the defaults will be set to "Principal" for principals and "Witness" for witnesses. For custom tag types, the defaults will be set to the first (for principals) and second (for witnesses) role in the list. Thereafter, you can change the defaults for each tag type as you wish. This will not change any role assignments for existing tags. New projects (and projects created by an import) - The initial first two roles in the role order for all standard tag types will be Principal and Witness respectively. You can change that after the project is created.o Tag Entry - Clicking [Tag type] from an event tag, making no changes, and immediately clicking [select] will no longer result in any changes to the roles used by that tag. Tag Entry - Clicking [Tag type] from an event tag, selecting a new tagtype and clicking [select] will result in the following: Any roles existing in the new tag type will be retained and will use those roles as defined in the new tag type. Any roles that do not exist in the new tag type will be changed to the new default roles (as defined above) for the selected tag type. Bug Fixes Program start - When starting the program, a few users got: Program Error / Data type mismatch." Click Ignore. "Program Error / Variable'LNMESSAGELEN' is not found. UFT Import - The UFT import hadn't been updated to deal with the changes in how roles are stored in the tag type table in v8.05 and later.o Open project - Several users were seeing a stack space error when theyopened a project after starting the program. Move Person - An error occured when a person is moved from one data set to another: Invalid subscript reference. 313 MERGEROLES Add Tag - A user reported an error when adding a Burial, Death or Marriage tag using CTRL+U. CTRL+D or CTRL+M respectively: ErrorMarker: Subscript is outside defined range. 24 GETPARTID. Tag Entry - The role lists in Tag Entry showed the role IDs of deactivated roles. Tag Entry - The warning message when a role was selected for a person of the wrong sex displayed the role ID# rather than the role name. Tag Entry - When in Beginner mode, roles displayed as role IDs rather than as role names. Tag Entry - A user got an error when clicking the [sentence] button toopen the Sentence field: Variable 'ORIGINAL' is not found. FRMPROLE.MROLESFORRCM. Narrative reports - There was an 'end of sentence' processing issue innarrative reports where an erroneous character would show up before thesentence-ending period. The erroneous character differed depending on the report output destination (screen or different filetypes).o Narrative reports - There were erroneous characters showing repeatedly in Norwegian reports output to RTF. Master Source List - Some refinements were made as to what is allowed when accessing the Master Source List from the Tag Entry / Citation screen. Master Tag Type List - When a project was updated from TMG7 to TMG8, tag types with custom styles that have new roles added when updating to TMG8 were displaying the wrong style in the MTTL. They all showed the correct custom style when you opened the Tag Type Definition screen. Master Tag Type List - Errors occurred when using the translate function to import sentences. Sentence construction - The [R+:rolename] role variables wereincorrectly stored when the project was updated to v8.05. They have now been fixed. [v8.06.0000] 28 Mar 2013 New The numbering of multiple .LOG files and .LST files added to the project folder has been changed to a numeric sequence (file, file1, file2, etc.). Role variables - When you edit a field containing a role variable and save the field, any spaces before or after the role name within the role variable will now be removed. Bug Fixes Preferences / Program Options / Reports - "WordPerfect 7" is no longer included in the 'Preferred output types' list. Validate File Integrity - An error could occur when using the [search in subfolders] feature: Variable 'TFILENAME' is not found. MENUOBJTMG.MVALIDATEINTEGRITY 331. Validate File Integrity – An error could occur when using the [search in subfolders] feature, running VFI, and then running VFI again: Operator/operand type mismatch 23 FRMAD2.INIT Tag Entry - Clicking [Tag Types] from a relationship tag and clicking [Add] gave an error: ErrorMarker: Array dimensions are invalid. 9 TAGTYPEDEFINITION.MUPDATERCRCO Tag Entry - If a tag type has custom roles, but Principal and Witness do not have sentences, then the custom roles do not show in the drop down lists in the Tag Entry window. Tag Entry / Sentence - Prompt to copy principal sentence to other principal didn't work. Sentence construction - The [R+:rolename] sentence variable was broken. Dates - There were some issues with date display and saving the data when the program date display format was set to yyyy.mm.dd. Journal report - When 'Blanks for missing data' was selected, the settings for Birth, Marriage, Death and Burial on the Tags tab weren't being respected when unselected. Tag Type Definition Screen - Name group tag types couldn't be edited. [v8.05.0000] 22 March 2013 Enhancements WordPerfect has been added to the Report Destination / File Type selections on the Report Definition Screen. TMG v8.05 includes a major redesign of how roles are stored in the database. For more details, see... http://www.whollygenes.com/forums201/index.php?showtopic=14990 A [search in subfolders] option has been added to the 'List of folders for location' screen under Validate File Integrity. To use this feature, add a folder to search for missing external exhibit files. Select this folder in the list and click the [search in subfolders] button. This will mark the folder with an "*". When Validate File Integrity is run and the 'Search for missing external exhibits' option is selected, this folder and its subfolders will be searched. List screens - The default data set selection on the list screens (Picklists, Master Source List, Master Repository List, Master Place List, Master Event List, Master Tag Type List, Master Style List, Source Types, Source Elements) were revised. When there is only one data set, the data set selector will be inactive. Add Person - Now all methods of adding a new spouse use the role "Principal" by default for both principals in the new Marriage tag regardless of the sort order of the roles in the tag type. The only way to get a different role is to include the "Principal" field of the Marriage tag type in the Add Person template and manually change the role. Bug Fixes OCX registration - When you run TMG8 for the first time after installing under Windows 8 and try to open a project, some users got an error message about three OCX registration failures. GEDCOM import - Editing an imported custom tag type could give an error. ErrorMarker: Function argument value, type, or count is invalid. 11 TAGTYPEDEFINITION.MUPDATELIST. Validate File Integrity - VFI could change the custom role assigned to a witness to the role 'Witness'. This issue is resolved by the new role design (above). Validate File Integrity - When a user ran VFI, a very large number of surety values were fixed. This should happen only once but in some cases, the issue reoccured periodically. Further changes were made to resolve this issue. Accent - An error could occur with multiple field accents after moving a field up and clicking [Apply]. Operator/operand type mismatch. 51 CUSACCENTMANAGER.MGETCOLOR. Tag Entry / Memo / Embedded Citations - The last cited source for the tag wasn't being highlighted when the Master Source List was opened during the embedded citation entry process. Tag Entry / Sentence - When a role sentence used [W] and this role was assigned to a Principal, then the sentence preview displayed "unknown witness" but reports output the name of the Principal. Tag Entry / Add Witness - Under certain circumstances, a selected name would revert to the primary name when the Witness was saved. Tag Entry / Add/Edit Witness - When the ID# was entered directly, the contents of the sentence field were copied to the memo field (and would overwrite any existing data in the memo field. Sentence construction / Event variables - Some issues with the [:NP:] variable were fixed. Name tags - An error could occur when creating Name-Var tags using +V. Illegal redefinition of var LLPRIMARY. 80 FRMNAMETAG.CNTBASICDETAIL.CNTNAME1.MSAVE. Project Explorer - When filtering for Givenname, the 'Does not contain' operator didn't work. Project Explorer - Some names were not being displayed after merging projects or data sets. Project Explorer - An error could occur when expanding a family. GC_PE_SP' is not found. 69 FRMEXPLORER.CNTPVIEW.CNTTREE.MSTANDARDEXPAND. Custom toolbars - The images of active/inactive custom toolbar buttons were not working correctly and have been fixed. Add Person - If you use Add Person and use a existing place that has a place style that differs from the settings, you get a prompt to change the place style to match the settings [Yes] or to keep the existing place style [No]. If you choose [No] to keep the current place style, the choice was ignored and the place style was changed to match the settings. Add Person - After updating a TMG7 project to TMG8, an error could occur when using Add Person. Variable 'LNS37' is not found. 48 CREATEAPTEMPLATE. Add Multiple People - The columns on any Add Multiple People form can be moved left/right to show a different order. If you move a Name part column out of order, the name would be sorted incorrectly in the Picklist. Report Definition Screen / Options / General tab - If you type an invalid value of '0' into the 'Number of generations' field or the 'First Reference Number' field and try to change the tab or save the Options, the program would hang. Reports - Diacritics or special high bit characters entered in the researcher information were not printing in reports. Narrative reports - The sequence of witnesses (as determined by the Tag Entry screen) in reports wasn't honored when roles were used. Audit report - The "Birth after non-birth events" and "Death before non-death events" tests were being conducted only on non-primary tags. They should be conducted only on primary tags. Descendant Box Charts / Options / data Types - When a new data type was added, this change was not being saved when the chart configuration was saved. Family Group Sheet - The presence of should affect the option on the Report Options "Memos" tab of "Memos that are not included in the sentence". For the FGS it did not. Journal report - On the General tab of the Journal report under Direction/Ancestor, selecting the box to restrict data for siblings to "BMDB only" didn't work. Journal report - When a report was indexed by both given name and places, the name index was by surname rather than by given name. Kinship report - Some spouses of siblings were missing. List of Names - An error could occur with the Subject filter when filtering on a flag. For example... 'Subject... SEX = M END'. LCVALUETYPE' is not found. 71 XFILTERNAMES. List of People - The filters 'Any Event Sentence (Default) Is not empty' and 'Any Event Sentence (Default) Is empty' resulted in an error. Function name missing. 41 XFILTERFILE_EDSENTENCE. List of Tag Types - The filters for Sentence Principal and Sentence Witness returned incorrect results for the operators 'Is Empty' and 'Is Not Empty'. Compressed Pedigree Report - Truncate to printer didn't work when the report was output to Word. Source templates - If you use Split CDs, and repeat the same segment in a template, and have conditional brackets around the second appearance, those conditional brackets appear in the output notes. Master Place List - An error could occur when sorting the MPL. ErrorMarker: Array dimensions are invalid. 74 FRMPLACESORT.INIT. Master Tag Type List / Tag Type Definition screen - The placeholder sentences for a new tag will now contain the tag name rather than 'New Tag'. Tag Type import - An error could occur during tag type import. Invalid subscript reference. 390 FRMTTL.MIMPORT. Tag Import - The error message when trying to import tags from an earlier program version was updated. Merge two people - If you merge two people you could get the same tags from both people marked as primary. Other issues - Dozens of minor corrections were made including text messages, cosmetic issues and language issues.

This is a known issue which remains in the final version of TMG. See the description and workaround in my report on those bugs I have identified here: http://www.mjh-nm.net/BUGS.HTML#B38

I know you said, Dave, that: but a sentence template is for a particular role and could either be "local" or "global". If your example above is from what you see in the Tag Type Definition of the Marriage Tag Type for a particular role, that may not be the actual template being used by the people in a particular Marriage tag. They could be assigned a different role, or have a local template for that tag for that role. So when you post back, as Terry suggests, be sure to be clear where you are getting the template text you are citing.

Hi Dave, Please recognize that Wholly Genes as a company is not answering these posts. They no longer develop, sell, or provide support for TMG We who are left replying are just die-hard users trying to help other users. Yes, there may be some level of frustration with this program, but with significant power and control over what it does comes a level of complexity in understanding how to cause it to do what you want. As I have said in another of your posts, for details of what is going on and "how to do it" I recommend reviewing the web pages of Terry's TMG Tips.

Hi Dave, For preview, I suspect that you have done a Copy/Paste, perhaps from a word processing document, and the text contains unprintable characters which are preventing the text from showing. When you want to Paste such copied text, use the right-click memo in TMG and choose "Paste Unformatted Text". That will strip the unprintable characters. As for reports, be sure that your sentence template for that tag type includes the Memo variable to output the memo text. Most default sentence templates do not include that variable. As for "how to do it", I suggest reviewing Terry Reigel's on-line web pages explaining TMG. As you are discovering, UFT did many thing "automatically" (whether you wanted it or not). In TMG you are in control, but that comes with a price as it often means you have to tell TMG what you want as it will not do many things automatically (like include the memo in the narrative output). I highly recommend starting with Terry's Basic Tips discussion to understand what is going on with TMG. Hope this gives you ideas,

I would also point out that many users have encountered problems when even only one person is using TMG if the folder containing the TMG data files is being mirrored by Dropbox. A safer procedure is to first Backup the project in TMG but not into a folder being mirrored. Then move the backup into a mirrored folder. That would signal ending an editing session and tht the project is available to the other person. Now removing the backup file from Dropbox would signal the project was in use and being edited. That could prevent a future conflict. Hope this gives you ideas.

No. You could potentially have very big problems. The .pjc file is simply a heading file. A TMG project consists of over 80 separate files, all of which have to be in sync. TMG can have multiple users of the same project if run on the same computer since it can do file locking. But Dropbox does background mirroring. You could make a change then she could, but if your version of one file got mirrored after hers while another got mirrored before hers there could be a real mess. I hope you have some good backups.

True, but in that case there should be some kind of official record of the cremation itself which can be cited specifying where it was done. For exactly such circumstances I created a custom tag type (Cremation) in the Burial group to record such events which I discuss here in my book. That is generally considered the officially documented event equivalent to a burial. I do not have enough cremations at the same crematorium among my ancestors to do this, but one could still have a "pseudo" person which was the crematorium as a Witness to any such events at that facility. I have not (yet) added a custom Witness role of "crematorium" in my Cremation tag's sentences for such pseudo people, but it could be similar to the cemetery role in the Burial tag I mention above. As for scattering (or burying) the ashes, I generally document that in an Anecdote tag as a separate event, since it can be quite some time later and in a different location that the actual cremation. As you note, such disposition of ashes events seldom have any "official" record, and the only source is usually some informal family record. But if you know the information, it can be quite a nice addition to that person's narrative, especially noting the person's involved in the event. Hope this gives you ideas,

Glad to hear you fixed it, Marlene. There had to be something unique about those 8 tags. I am guessing you had the "Cemetery" tag in the Burial group, and guess it was Primary for the Cemetery person but not for the buried person, so it showed on your list. I like having "pseudo" cemetery people. Like your idea of only using them for your 2 largest ones, I only use them for those cemeteries which contain a large number of my ancestors. But I do not have a separate tag. I just add the cemetery person as a Witness to the Burial tag itself with a custom role. I find this works well. If you are interested, in my on-line book describing "My Way" of customizing TMG I discuss the concept of "pseudo" people here, and specifically mention my way of using cemetery "people" (which I treat as one type of Location "people") here. The sentences for my Burial tag type are here which include the custom role for the "cemetery" Witness. If you ever decide to revisit that idea for your project perhaps my notes will be of interest. Hope this gives you ideas,

Doesn't make sense to me either, martielee. It has to be something about those specific 8 Burial tags, possibly in combination with the Report definition. I have tried to reproduce this with a bunch of ideas, and cannot seem to do so no matter what I have tried. What are your options on the Places tab of your List of People Report Options? What, if anything, do these 8 Burial tags have in common? Since you have looked carefully at the tags, could there be something special about the Place record(s) these tags are using? Are all 8 the same Location? Open the Master Place List and open each Place record to see what Style these Place records are using, and anything else that may look unusual. Have you done an Optimize lately? The Optimize routine is generally what cleans the Master Place List. Finally, try adding one more output column, which is "Burial Group* tag; Place" with a large width and see what that produces in the report for these 8. I know it sounds like I am clutching at straws, but TMG is not random. Any report output is based on the data and its settings, and the options of the report. So there has to be something we are overlooking.

Check that the language used in the tags and the language of the report match.

Is it correct that these 8 people appear in your report but with no place data? I can think of two possible issues. First you only output three of the ten place fields, but the filter is for any field non-empty. Could there be data only in one of the other fields? Second could there be some unprintable characters in these fields, often caused by copy/paste from another source? Hope this gives you ideas.

Move your exhibits to where you want them, then use Validate and tell it where to look for the exhibits.

Phil, Remember that TMG allows multiple Name tags for a given person. If you have these "Names" from some source, you may wish to keep a Name tag showing them as you received them, but add a second Name tag that is your "standard" or "correct" structure for the name. While I think you still will have to "eat an elephant", you might consider adding these second Name Tags using the TMG Utility feature of Add Standard Names. I would also recommend setting a custom Flag with an "unfixed" value for these people which you can set to "fixed" once you have corrected their Name. As for importing people in to TMG using CSV, the new TMG "Add Multiple People" and "Add Family" features both accept a CSV file, but there are severe limitations. The "Add Multiple People" can take a single CSV file for a whole host of people and have data for a variety of tags per person in that file as part of the Add. But all the people are added as unrelated. You would have to then manually make the parent/child and spousal relationships, etc. If you have a bunch of unrelated people this might help. You could create a CSV file of just them, correct them in Excel, delete them from the original TMG project, and then add them back in using "Add Multiple People". The "Add Family" can include appropriate parent/child links for a family. But the importing CSV file can contain only one family, so you would have to add one family at a time. "Add Family" has a "Shared Events" feature which might be used to enter the shared marriage event, but I have not tried this feature, much less as part of a CSV import file, and have always manually entered the marriage data each time when prompted. A combination of "Add Multiple People" and Merge might help, or might be more work that it was worth. You could construct a CSV file from the existing people being sure the file contained something to uniquely identify each person. Then you could make the batch corrections in Excel to produce a new CSV with only the names and their unique identifier. Then Add these people back in. And finally Merge each added person to their original person which would merge in their new Name. Not sure if 7,000 Merge operations would make things any easier than "eating the elephant", but just one more idea to consider. Hope this gives you ideas,

I hope your backup has worked. First, I notice you mention that the source is referred to as number (1:310). The '1:' in front of the number indicates that this Project has multiple Datasets, and this source only exists in dataset '1'. Is it possible you used the Dataset Manager to either hide or remove dataset '1', or that you changed to view a person who is not in dataset '1'? Next, you mention that you are using TMG9.04. Note that TMG9.05 is the final version. Since the Wholly Genes upgrade server has closed, the "Check for Update" within the program will no longer work. You will have to manually download the final installer version and install it yourself. See the final installer post for the location of the installer you need. Finally, if you have a large project, with many tags, and it is from an older version, then it is possible to have that many problems fixed by Validate. I would recommend whenever you load a project in a new version to immediately run Optimize and then Validate on the project. Keep running that pair of maintenance routines in that order until Validate shows no errors, as a pass may clean up some things sufficiently for a subsequent Validate to see some other things now needing to be fixed. When you finally get no errors in Validate, do a final Optimize. Then do a Backup of the now fixed Project. Hope this helps,

Can't possibly help without more details.

With Wholly Genes closing its doors I am not surprised. I fully expected that server to no longer be running after December 31st when final support ended. But since the Wholly Genes on-line store has closed I guess it is not surprising that the update server does not respond. Even the installer files themselves are no longer on the Wholly Genes server but have been moved to a software mirroring site as the links in Jim's post indicate. So be sure to follow his links to obtain the full installer file.

While several people have reported problems with "search for update", it does seem that following Jim's advice of doing a clean install as he describes at the link he cited has been what works. Even if you do not wish to upgrade from V9.04 to V9.05 today, be sure to grab a copy of the full installer of V9.05 while it exists. You may decide later to upgrade and you will need the file. You say "I have a working TMG 9.04 now that I am hesitant to destroy." If you have the V9.04 installer file on your computer, at the very least you could reinstall it as a last resort. But based on other users' experiences, following Jim's directions should work just fine.

Sorry, Rod, I know of no variables or features in TMG to do this. Of course, you could always create your sentence template to include an optional split memo part, and then type in anything you wanted to include in that memo part. Unfortunately, if any of this information were to change you would have to manually correct the memo. The sentence template might be something like: [P] married [PO] Then the split memo part [M2] could contain: [POF] was born 15 September 1918 in German Twp., Fulton Co., OH to [PARO] To have the information work for both bride and groom, you would have to reserve a separate memo part for each of the two principals. For example, the above could be the Male sentence template for the tag type, and the Female sentence template could be nearly the same but use [M3]: [P] married [PO] Hope this gives you ideas,

I would also recommend either creating a Journal report in TMG V9.04, or creating a set of Web pages to send them using the companion Second Site program which then would be viewable with any web browser.

It is not clear what you mean by a "driver". The normal full TMG-8 installer will install the complete program on a 64 bit windows 7 or 8 operating system. And the new report generator in TMG 8 will work in 64 bit. What problem are you encountering?

Rae Jean, My regular desktop runs WinXP Pro SP2 and runs TMG 9 with no problems. I don't know why that would be different than WinXP Home SP1, but at least it gives you another data point.