Michael Hannah

Steve, I dusted off my old Version 4 Reference Manual and on pg. 20 the description of Backup says: Like Jim posted, this looks like it may be what you have. Thus, in TMG Version 7.04 you would use File > Import and when the Wizard asks for the Import file type, select "The Master Genealogist v4.x or Earlier BACKUP (*.SQZ)". I suggest copying the SQZ file to your hard disk and doing the import from there. If it is not a v4 backup file, the Import will give you a message, so there is no harm in trying.

You are most welcome. Keep the questions coming! You make us feel needed.

Don't dispair! Start small and work up. And feel free to ask questions! Us fellow users on this Forum are happy to try to help. I suggest that you start small and experiment. For example, with the FGS select only One person and Use the Current Focus Person. Make the Current Focus a person with lots of tags, ancestors, and descendents so you can see what happens. Then open the Options and change various values and re-run the report to see the differences. And also experiment with the differences you get when you only do a Print Preview versus saving it to a Word Processor file and looking at it in that Word Processor. Then experiment using a different type of report such as the Individual Narrative or the Journal Report. In my experience actually seeing what happens to the report is my best way to learn what the Options do. Don't be afraid to experiment with generating reports! As long as you don't use the special Options on the Secondary Output tab, running a report will not modify your data. If all you do is look at them on the screen you have not wasted paper and only need to either write over that file the next time you run the report or just delete the file. And check out the included TMG Help, it really can be very useful. Hope this gives you ideas,

Yes, but it seems Mr. Kim Sanders may not.

There is no such announcement. WhollyGenes never publishes details about future products, only details of a new product when it is released.

Don't know if this is related to your dynazip errors, but I always do the three Maintenance steps of Optimize / Validate / Optimize before doing a backup. And remember that if you get an error during Validate you are not done. You should do an Optimize followed by another Validate as a pair until you get no Validate errors. I have been told the reason for this is that fixing some Validate errors can then expose others that need to be fixed by a subsequent Validate. And when you finally get no Validate errors, do the final Optimize. Only then would I recommend doing your backup. And I always do the backup and restore using the local hard drive. Following this procedure I have never had a restore problem.

After step 2 I have also found it good "hygene" to do the three Maintenance steps of "Optimize / Validate File Integrity / Optimize" after deleting the unwanted datasets in that copied project and before you merge it into Project B.

Hi Vance, No, the output you are seeing is exactly how the special Source Element Groups for names are designed to work. You will get “Given Surname and Given2 Surname2” or “Given Surname, Given2 Surname2 and Given3 Surname3” for full footnotes, “Surname and Surname2” or “Surname, Surname2 and Surname3” for short footnotes 4 , “Surname, Given and Given2 Surname2” or “Surname, Given, Given2 Surname2 and Given3 Surname3” for the bibliography. While you may prefer something else, these are common practice. The only way to obtain different output is to use an element from a Source Element Group that is not one reserved for names (e.g. an element other than Author, Compiler, Editor, Subject, Second Person, or any one of their aliases). All other Source Element Groups will output exactly what you enter so you could produce whatever you want. Hope this gives you ideas,

Glad that helped, Neil. The filters for the PE are somewhat equivalent to those you get with a List of People report. But you were looking for details about specific events, so need a List of Events report. If you then want to create a list of the people with these specific events, you can always set a flag on the Secondary Output of the List of Events report. Then you can either filter the PE using that flag, or create a Focus Group. That might help in working through these people to update their events with any more detailed dates you now have.

Hi Neil, I see the same thing and believe I understand the issue. I can reproduce this behavior if I put something in the Search field but do not actually select anyone from the picklist (i.e. click on their name). Since you have not actually selected anyone when you click OK, TMG seems to use whatever people pointers are left in some internal table. As described by the TMG Help, in Multiple Witnesses mode you are expected to actually select (click on) one or more people. I do notice that if you choose the button on the Tag Entry screen to only add one Witness, then click the Picklist button on the Add Witness screen and use the Search feature, TMG will assume that the currently highlighted person is the single person you want without you needing to explictly select it. But that automatic selection of a single person does not occur in Multiple Witnessess mode. While TMG does state that you are expected to select people in this mode, its behavior when you don't is probably not "friendly" behavior. I will report it. In the meantime, when in Multiple Witnesses mode be sure to actually select one or more people.

Edited: I remembered/figured out the modifier issue. Amended below. =========== Sorry, Neil, if I was too brief. Those Date filter settings are not sub-fields, they are main fields. To also restrict to certain types of events you need a compound filter. For your complete filter for a List of Events report I would suggest: Date - Year Does not equal 0 AND Date - Day Equals 0 AND Date - Month Equals 0 AND Date Has No Modifier AND( Tag Type Group is Birth OR Tag Type Group is Death OR Tag Type Group is Marriage ) END Note carefully the parentheses around the Tag Type Group entries. Hope this gives you ideas,

You ask: "the problem isn't fixed in Win 7??" No, it is Vista (and Win 7) that introduced the problem. As has been said repeatedly in postings on this Forum, Vista (and Win 7 which is essentially equivalent to a service pack upgrade of Vista) chose to not support 16-bit applications within their operating system if that OS is run in 64-bit mode. The current release of TMG includes a third-party report generation package that contains 16-bit code. Vista (and the Win 7 upgrade of Vista) won't permit that small portion of TMG (as well as many other 16-bit applications from many other vendors) to work. The only way TMG (and many other vendor applications) will ever get their applications to work in the 64-bit version of either Vista or Win 7 is to produce a new version of that application that does not use 16-bit code. Wholly Genes has announced repeatedly that they are hard at work producing this new version of their report generator. However, everything else in TMG works just fine in either Vista or Win 7. There have been multiple postings of the instructions to get TMG to save to a pdf file in 64-bit Vista. If you are still having problems, please create a new post describing what you have tried and one of us users will try to help. I don't see why you should be using Legacy if you don't like it. Why not go back to TMG now since TMG works for everything except non-PDF reports?

Hi Neil, What have you tried? I tried the following which seems to work: Date - Year does not equal 0 AND Date - Day equals 0 AND Date - Month equals 0 END Those are zeroes for comparison. Not sure how to avoid modifiers, maybe someone else will have an idea.

Mike, Are you being confused by a message from VFI that says "checking for principals that are not witnesses"? I would guess that the meaning of that message is, as Jim keeps repeating, all principals should be witnesses and this check is making sure that they are.

Hi Tom, Not sure what "previous post" you are referring to? If it was this post here then everyone that commented (including myself) were just users like you, and I don't see where anyone "dismissed" the idea, or could officially claim to state TMG's design philosophy. I think the best overall comment was Jim's: "Exporting a witnessed event that makes sense under GEDCOM is non-trivial." Aspects of your ideas might work, but GEDCOM still has no construct or way to express the linkages between and among the Principal and all the Witnesses. As one example, I have custom tags where I intentionally exclude the Witness sentence, and only have sentence output about the Witnesses in the Principal sentence. It would appear that your proposal would produce no NOTE output for that Witness since there is no sentence? So how would the GEDCOM output for that Witness show any linkage to the TMG event? While I have followed and been involved in GEDCOM for decades, like Andy I don't see a lot of value in trying to add enhancements to the TMG GEDCOM export. The current GEDCOM standard is so old and increasingly obsolete for expressing the constructs like Witnesses found in almost all modern genealogy programs that what I think is really needed is a new standard or transport mechanism. If not GenBridge, then a new XML-based extensible interchange standard less likely to become obsolete. Personally, I have essentially abandoned GEDCOM and choose to output in HTML format, like you have done in the past using your webGED software. HTML is capable of expressing and preserving all these linkages and other modern features of genealogy software (as can be seen with Second Site and TMG). Just one user's opinion,

At least if you change flags by a report you can set the option in Program Options >> Reports for such flag changes to not update the Last Edited date. But you are correct that any manual change you make directly to the data for a person, including manual flag changes, will update the Last Edited date.

Peter, Don't really think this is a good idea for Validation. While rare, there might be cases where the user could have chosen to have a tag in the Death group and intentionally want the Living flag to something other than 'N'. I have seen people discuss how to record someone who was declared medically dead and brought back to life, for only one wierd example. TMG is dedicated to not automatically assuming anything about the user data, which I value. However, since the Flag is automatically modified when you "add" a tag in the Death group, seems reasonable to modify the Flag when such a tag is "added" as a result of a merge. Just one user's opinion,

Hi Peter, [i assume you mean "only after editing the death [b]tag[/b]"?] Yes, I think this has been mentioned before, and is how I understand the "automatic" updating of the Living flag works. My testing has shown that only if you add or edit a death tag will TMG notice and update the Living flag. I agree with you that it would be a nice addition (wish list?) to the merge operation to check whether the merge adds a death tag, and thus automatically update the Living flag, but it does not seem to do that now. Of course, any time you merge into a person it is always a good idea to carefully check and edit that person.

Glad to give you ideas. Let us know if you have problems/questions.

Sorry, John, if this seems either difficult or unclear, it shouldn't be. In hopes of making it clearer, in your specific case for whatever tag you are using, if you simply want their full name as you have entered for them, you could modify the sentence to be something like: "Possibly the [P+] whose [M] was registered in the [D]" Now you could put "death" in the memo, and "December quarter 1901" as the date, and some reasonable Sort Date, and because of the plus sign you get their full name. Of course, even easier is to change the sentence to be simply "[M]" and type into the memo exactly how you want the sentence to read. So you could simply have a memo of: "Possibly the Frederick Richards whose death was registered in the December quarter 1901" More typing, but guaranteed to produce what you want. As for your comments about Witnesses, a great majority of my tags have Witnesses, especially with custom roles. I find it one of the most essential features of TMG. Like yourself, I did find many of the default sentences for Witnesses needed customization. However, I believe that creating these custom sentences and custom roles is incredibly easy and simple, thus releasing the power of this Witness feature. Using your example, I think it would be easy to create a custom role of "Godfather" for that Witness with a custom Witness sentence of something like: "[W] was asked to be godfather of the child [P] born [D]" Thus no implication that they were in the delivery room Not sure what you find difficult here? Perhaps if you described your problems one of us users could offer suggestions?

Hi John, The following does not directly address your specific question, but might be an alternative. The fact that tags in the Burial Group do not imply a death or Lifespan calculation is why many of us choose to create a custom tag in the Death group for these situations. For example, I have defined a custom tag type in the Death Group which I have named "BurialAsDeath". While its sentences only describe burial, since it is in the Death Group TMG and Second Site will use it for Lifespan calculations. If you first create such a custom tag type you then could use the TMG Utility to convert all your existing Burial tags for only those people with no Death tags to this custom tag. First use the Secondary Output on a List of People report to set a Flag for these people. The filter might be something like: # of Death Group tags | = Equals | 0 | AND # of Burial Group tags | > Is greater than | 0 END Then change a Flag value based on this filter. Now close TMG, and in the TMG Utility under the Events functions select "Change Event Type". Choose the From event type to be "Burial" and the To event type to be "BurialAsDeath" (which is why the custom tag type must be defined first). Be sure to go to the bottom of this screen to "Set Flag Filter". Choose the Flag you set above to "Include" only those people with the appropriate Flag value. Remember to do a full backup of your project before trying any of this. The advantage of this is that the "BurialAsDeath" tag will be used for Lifespan calculations. The disadvantage is that you only have one tag for the two events of Death and Burial, which means this one tag can only have one date or memo etc., and in some reports this one event is listed/abbreviated as a death not a burial because it is in the Death Group. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hi John, You are actually asking for three separate things, so need to be using three separate features at once. First (assuming you are talking about the married female) you need to have added a separate Name-Marr tag for her that includes her married surname. Next, you must select that Name-Var as the name to use for that sentence for her whether this is a Principal or Witness sentence. Finally, to ensure that you get her full name (both given and surname) the sentence variable (if it is not the first in a TMG paragraph) may need to include a plus-sign, e.g. [P+], [W+], or [R+:rolename]. Hope this gives you ideas,

Glad you understand, Earl. Volunteer users like myself who try to respond are aware that many users read these replies, so we try to be complete in our explanations. And please keep posting wishes! Us users never know what wishes, or what idea from a wish, the developers (who do lurk on this forum) may choose to implement.

While I would recommend adding the data manually to ensure you create all the necessary tags and citations, you might want to look at the TMG Utility. Its "Add Events" feature, described here, which uses a structured text file, may provide the importation of events you desire. This feature will only add one type of event at a time. Further the tag types with desired roles, the people to be linked to as Principals and Witnesses, and sources to be cited all must already exist in the dataset prior to using the Utility to add the events. Hope this gives you ideas.

Hi Earl, First, rather than pop up the Master Event List, you could simply produce a List of Events report. That report allows you to output each of the various Place fields (and even the sub-fields of the Detail field) as separate columns and sort on whichever columns you wish. This may directly provide what you seek? Secondly, the real issue in TMG is that a Place is not truly part of the Event tag. What you really have is a link from the Event tag to a single Place record in the Master Place List. Thus the Master Event List simply shows you which single Place entry this Event is linked to, which is why that column is not subdivided. During data entry TMG makes it easier for you to make this linkage, since when you enter the various place fields in the Event tag it will search the Master Place List and either link to the single existing Place record you are describing or create a new Place record if needed and link to that new entry. The beauty of this "relational database" linkage method is that if you modify a single Place entry in the Master Place list, the information is now reflected in all of the Event tags linked to that Place, no matter how many such Events. As Jim suggests, using the Master Place List to sort by place fields may be a better alternative. By clicking the Sort button on that screen you can sort the Place records by any hierarchy of fields you wish, e.g. Country then State then City, etc. Then by highlighting any single Place record, the Events button on that screen will show all the Events linked to that single Place record. Perhaps this screen will provide what you seek? Hope this helps explain how TMG works today, but it never hurts to express a wish!