Michael Hannah

Sorry, that PAR variable will always output a leading and trailing comma. The versions of the variables MOTH or FATH produce only the name. However, while you can customize sentences using MOTH and FATH to avoid the automated relationship and commas, the PAR variable automates the handling of all the cases of only one or both parents defined. Notice that all versions of the parent variables output only the primary full names. To obtain other versions of the names Witness roles must be used, which would also have the problem of cases of only one or both parents defined. Thus the only way I know to reliably do what you want is to have the sentence template only the [M] variable and manually type in the output appropriate for that person directly in the memo, possibly using Witnesses. Hope this gives you ideas,

I can't think of an easy way to do this. However, you can produce a Columnar type of the List of Sources report which could help using a Filter of: Second Person- Other // Is Not Empty // END Output the Source "Abbrev" and "Source Number" and you should be able to work your way through these sources. I can think of two ways to do this. A- Define a new equivalent but alternate Source Type for each current Source Type which uses "Second Person", where the "old" Type has templates which include the "Second Person" element, and the "new" Type instead has templates which use the "Record Type" element. Then change the Source Type of all the affected Sources and cut/paste the data from the now unused Second Person element to the Record Type element. You will know which Source Type uses a given element in its templates by the style of the name of that element on the General Tab. A name enclosed in <conditional brackets> means its only uses are <conditional> .An Initial uppercase letter means the element is Required in at least one Pattern sentence and therefore “something” will print for this element. If the element name is all lowercase letters, this element is not defined or used in any Pattern or output sentence for this defined source or source type so anything you enter is not defined to be output anywhere. Once you change the Type it will be easy to see which name needs its data cut/paste. B- This way is probably more prone to error but... Modify all the Source Types which currently use the "Second Person" element to add the new "Record Type" element in the same place in the templates, making sure both elements are conditional. Now for of all the affected Sources cut/paste the data from the Second Person element to the Record Type element. Hope this gives you ideas,

Glad the comments could give you ideas, I also think your decision will make your life easier.

Have you run the maintenance routines?

Yes, the same photo can be linked to people, sources, event tags, repositories, citations and place records, but you must do link each separately. This is one of the best reasons to link the exhibits as "external" exhibits. That way the photo is only stored once, but there can now be several different events or people, etc. linked to that same one photo. Glad this helped you,

How are you adding the exhibit? Exhibits can be linked to people, sources, event tags, repositories, citations and place records. If you are clicking on the Exhibit icon on the window for editing a source, event, repository, citation or place, the exhibit will be attached to that entity. To link an exhibit to a person you should be viewing that person''s details and open the Exhibit Log itself either from the Tools menu or a toolbar button, then click on its Add button. That will link the exhibit to the person and allow one of multiple exhibits linked to the person to be Primary for that person. Also if your Layout includes the Image subwindow, double clicking on that subwindow will open the Exhibit Log itself for you to now Add a Person exhibit. Hope this helps,

Yes, "skepticism" is the appropriate word. I have heard of some cloud-based virtual desktops operating as follows: Create a temp space for the program and data files. Do real time automatic cloud backup of the temp data files while the program is running. If that is the implementation, then the well-known issue of automatic backup could arise.

If the virtual desktop in running on the user's own desktop then it would not have the problems warned about as shown by TMG's successful operation with Parallels. But if the virtual desktop is running on some external cloud computer, I would definitely worry that it might have the same problems we have seen before, depending upon the implementation of the interaction with the external cloud. It "may" work, but I wouldn't trust it.

No, sorry I was so brief, but you misunderstood. I meant that, yes, one should expect the same problems mentioned, and I would not recommend it.

Yes.

Tom Malek asked: > I'm trying to understand UK references to what "appear" to be places so would appreciate more assistance. I don't use the UK version, but many of my ancestors come from Britain so have experience with UK place names. There are many reference sources which can help with this. I have several old books and also check genealogy society web sites for references for UK place names, but usually start with a search in Wikipedia. However, your question is most reasonable since UK place names can be very confusing as you will see below. > I have seen numerous references to Boroughs. It is my understanding that Boroughs are a subdivision of a city or town. I think of them as named neighborhoods. As a similar example, in some of the larger US cities they would probably be numbered Wards of the city which are often referenced in census enumerations. > ... residence: Civil Parish "St George the Martyr Southwark, London, England." In the same census - Registration district "St Saviour Southwark." As mentioned above Southwark is a Borough of the city of London. As further subdivisions Boroughs can have Districts. (To make things really complicated there is a District named Southwark of the Borough of Southwark of the City of London, so would be "Southwark, Southwark, London, England"!!!) Now to complicate things further, there also are areas known as a Parish. Originally they were the area which was the jurisdiction of a given church. Now, however, a civil parish is a country subdivision forming the lowest unit of local government in England. And to make matters worse, like Registration districts the boundaries of a civil parish can in some cases straddle the boundaries of more than one District or Borough, or even straddle the boundaries of more than one City or County. Think of US Congressional districts whose boundaries often have no relationship to any other governmental entity. As for "St George the Martyr, Southwark, London, England" see the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwark_St_George_the_Martyr which shows it as a Civil Parish wholly within the boundaries of the Borough of Southwark in the City of London. As for Registration districts, quoting from the Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_district : So for St Saviour Registration District in London, see: https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/districts/st saviour southwark.html which shows this Registration District was created in 1837 and abolished in 1901, and contained four Civil Parishes over time. Confusing, Huh?!! > Does any of this get recorded in a place name field, comment section, etc.? Well that is a matter of personal choice in how you want to use TMG Place records and fields. The real issue is to ensure that the Source Citations when output include all the information available, and the Narration of the event lists all that is known about the location of an event. For citations I usually enter details below Level 3 in the CD, and for events I enter such details in a split memo part which is referenced in the sentence template to output just before the Place. But that is just my style. In general I choose to only use the Level 3 field and higher in Place records, but that is simply my preference to minimize the number of unique entries in the Master Place List. Further, I reserve the Level 1 field for a sort code to make it easier to find and use existing Place records by using the F2 key in the Level 1 field. I have recorded considerable detail about how I enter Places in my on-line book. See the Section concerning entering Places in the Data Entry chapter here: https://www.mjh-nm.net/DATENTRY.HTML#Places Scroll down to "2) My Non-U.S. locations:" to see some examples of how I choose to handle UK Places. Hope this begins to help explain confusing UK place names and gives you some ideas, Michael

Welcome back, Simon. Some of us users, such as Jim and myself, are still monitoring this Forum and answering questions. The TMG-L email list is also still active with users helping users. If you are back to using TMG you may wish to upgrade from your Version 8 to the final released version, which is Version 9.05. It has several enhancements and fixed bugs from Version 8 which I think are valuable. You can still purchase a license to the final Version 9.05 from one on-line vendor, Harry Goegebeur, then download the installer from on-line. See the following post on this Forum for the link to his email address and details: http://www.whollygenes.com/forums201/index.php?/topic/15915-tmg9-final-installers-v905/

What Collate sequence are you using in your TMG Project? (See Preferences / Current Project Options / Other) If your Collate sequence for that Project is other than "GENERAL'" you could be seeing the symptoms of a known remaining bug. If not, then there must be some other cause. For the Collate sequence bug see the description about "Changing Primary Name designation" in my list of outstanding bugs.

You commented: " because backing up everything with one file is far superior..." Concerning TMG and exhibits I strongly disagree. I believe it is always better to backup external exhibits separately from the rest of TMG. And if you backup all external exhibits as a single backup file, and all of TMG except the external exhibits as a single backup file, you do not have "bits and pieces", you only have two backup files. Further, typically exhibits are changed or added considerably less often that changes within TMG. Thus the exhibit backup can be done less often, and the TMG backup can (and should) be done more frequently as it will be smaller and faster. Combining both exhibits and TMG in the same single backup file can easily cause that single backup file to grow larger than the operating system can handle for a single file. Several TMG users have encountered exactly that problem. Just my considered advice from user experience,

First, the VFI log should identify the 110 missing exhibit files which may help. The only thing I have used which sometimes finds my exhibit errors is Second Site. If you build an Image gallery I think it actually accesses the exhibits to build thumbnails. The error log from that software is usually pretty good.

Hi Peter, I have TMG 9.05 running on one machine with Windows XP with no problems, but Win2K is even older than XP. Although XP is supposedly based on Win2K there are differences which I guess could affect TMG. I am surprised that TMG 8.08 works but 9.05 does not. Most of the enhancements made to TMG to prepare it for more modern versions of Windows, such as the new report writer, were already done by 8.08. Then 9.05 added features and fixed several bugs in hopes it would suffice for several years. I fear the "dreaded" time has come when you really need to invest in a more modern operating system. Sorry, I know this can be a pain, but in the world of computers 18 years old is really old.

Hi Judy, First, excluding a Marriage event will exclude the narrative sentence it outputs. But the Marriage event itself still exists, so I guess an Ancestor or Descendant chart will still show that the people are married but I had not tested that. If you want to create any custom tag type I suggest starting with Terry Tips about Customizing Your Tags. As usual his Tips are the best place to start when using a feature in TMG which is new to you.

Judy, It depends on what "White listing" means to the software. Often is not the same as excluding that software from even scanning the entire TMG folders. White listing may exclude the software from looking at the executable program itself, but the software may still look at (and thus possibly interfere with) the data files when TMG is trying to write to them. That may now require Administrator privileges to "also" access the data files whenever this other program is scanning them. As Jim has often said, in addition to entering the serial number as an ordinary user one should select to Run as Administrator, enter the serial number, then immediately exit TMG. One should now not have to Run as Administrator again. If one does, something else is going on. If a user has to Run as Administrator, it is possible that instead of immediately exiting they continued to work on their projects while Administrator. In that case it is possible that some of the configuration and/or data files are now exclusively "owned" by Administrator, and running as an ordinary user now would not have the security privileges to access those files. Or yet something else could be going on.

Judy, There is an alternative for event tag types. Define separately-named custom tag types and then exclude these separate tag types from your report. For example, define a tag type in the Marriage group, possibly named "Marriage Sensitive". Then when you choose to produce a report you can Select which tag types are included and simply not include the sensitive tag types. When the report runs, there is no marriage. But depending upon the report that may not keep the "sensitive" children or parents from appearing. To exclude people I find the best way is using Flags. You could have a Flag named SENS, which you set to Y for those people you wish to exclude from some reports. Now you can filter the people who are subjects of the report based on the Flag which, depending upon the report, may give you what you want. Finally the most certain but brute force way is to use the List of People report filtered by this Flag, and use its Secondary Output to create a temporary separate Project of all people who do not have this Flag set to Y. In that temporary Project any sensitive children or parents no longer exist so will not have a relationship tag to the parent or child. You can run whatever reports you wish because these people are now not in this Project. However you may still need to "deselect" custom "Sens" event tag types as mentioned above. Otherwise you could still have, for example, a Marriage to what is now an "unknown" person, or a Witness reference to an "unknown person". When done with running the sensitive reports simply delete this temporary Project, and continue to do all your data entry and editing in the main Project which has all people. Hope this gives you ideas,

What report are you trying to run? What is the Report Destination, Word, or ?? What are your configuration choices on the Sources tab of the Report Options? I assume from your comment that you marked "Endnotes". Did you mark "Unique"? Do the events within the report have endnote numbers to indicate that endnotes do exist for these events?

Judy mentioned: Now I think I understand better, Judy. You set the children as Primary to the step-father and bio-mother, right? (Always check whether the relationship is Primary from the child's Detail view,, i.e. who are the two parents in the top slots. Checking from the parents Detail view doesn't help. The asterisk in the parent's view means something else.) That explanation makes things clearer. Actually what you are doing is "backwards" to what TMG expects. Doesn't mean what you are doing is "wrong", only that you are now battling TMG's automatic assumptions. Setting the "children of the two bio-parents" as Primary to both their bio-parents is what TMG expects and what all its reports assume. TMG "assumes" that Primary parent/child relationships are by definition biological relationships. Using the tag name variation of step-parent/child is intended to be only a visual aid to you. Just because you chose the Primary relationship type as step-parent/child, TMG will still treat it as a biological/genetic relationship because it is Primary. Any TMG ancestor/descendant linkages assume that Primary relationships are biological relationships. TMG expects that the user will use the non-bio relationship types only for non-Primary relationships, so automatically assumes any non-Primary relationship is not biological even if the tag type name is bio. If you keep TMG's assumptions in mind, this is why TMG reports automatically list the Primary relationship children for parents in their Journal narrative, and do not list non-Primary relationship children. The name of the relationship tag is ignored, it is the Primary setting (from the point of view of the child) that matters to TMG. Therefore, when you made the step-father and bio-mother relationships to these children Primary, these children will be listed automatically as the (assumed biological) children of this couple. Because you did not make their relationships to the bio-father Primary, they will not be listed automatically as his (assumed biological) children, even though you set the name of his relationship tag as bio. Only the two parents who are set as Primary for a child are assumed to be the couple who begat the child. The purpose of the "trick" of using the NarrativeChildren tag is to be able to list children who are not Primary to either of the couple of interest, since non-Primary children are never automatically listed. TMG assumes that normally you set both the bio-father and bio-mother as Primary for their children. In that case you need the "trick" of adding text to the narrative heading of the "family" of the (non-Primary) step-father and (Primary) bio-mother so that the step-father's narrative could list these non-biological step children, since they would not automatically be listed for him as they are not Primary to him. In the bio-mother's narrative TMG assumes they will be listed as the family of the bio-father/bio-mother couple, as both are Primary for these children. In your case, with the step-father and bio-mother set as Primary for these children they will automatically be listed in both of those people's narratives as that couple's family "as if" they were their biological children. The children will not be listed in the bio-father's narrative as he isn't Primary. And they will not be listed in the bio-mother's narrative as children of the bio-father/bio-mother couple since he isn't Primary. So now you have to do the "trick" for the bio-father and bio-mother family heading to get this couple's "family" to list these children, since they will not automatically be listed as they are not Primary for both of this couple. Does that help explain what you are seeing any better?

Sorry, Judy, but unfortunately this customization is a bit complicated. It is not clear what you want to do, and it will depend upon the specific parent/child and marriage situations you have. One example would be when one parent who has children remarries someone who has no children, and thus the new spouse would become the step-parent of any still-living children. While this new couple has a Marriage tag they have no Primary biological children together. This seems to be at least one case which you mentioned in your initial post. For the sake of the example below I will assume the Mother (Mary) remarries, and the new Father (John) is the stepfather of her three children but he has no children who will live with them. To create a list specific to each case you can just avoid creating Roles at all and define separate local sentence templates for each Principal in every NarrativeChildren tag you add. So assume you add a NarrativeChildren tag for John and Mary, where they are the Principals. You would locally change Mary's sentence template to something like: [:TAB:]There were no known children of [P] and [PO] Then you would locally change John's sentence template to something like: [:NP:][:TAB:]Step children living with [P], children of [PO], were[:CR:][LIND:]Fred, born 1916[:CR:]Sam, born 1918[:CR:]Sally, born 1920[:LIND][:TAB:]There were no known children of [P] and [PO] That's it for this one case. However, if both of the couple bring prior children to the new marriage you will need different sentence templates for both Principals. And if this couple also has biological children together then you will need yet different sentence templates for both Principals since TMG will automatically follow the output of their NarrativeChildren tag with the list of their biological children. If you want to define default Roles to use for NarrarativeChildren tags throughout the Project, because of what might automatically output for a parent depending upon whether there are Marriage tags or Primary children there can be a need for many different roles. That's why the descriptions in my book get so complicated. The example above makes lots of assumptions. If you have a specific case where you want to do this, I can suggest appropriate sentence templates. Michael

Okay, Judy, since you seem to be interested in this customization there are two stages. First, I suggest you start with Terry's basic description of this custom tag: Customizing the “Children of” Statement If your only output is a TMG Journal report, Terry describes this tag type extremely well. Note that for TMG you must modify/use the sentence template itself. The tag sentence template can provide a different heading, and/or add a note concerning the parent(s) of Non-Primary children, or the list of such children itself. That is why Roles are handy to define different sentence templates. But TMG only uses the sentences of the Principals, ignores the main tag Memo, and will not produce output from the sentences or memos of any linked Witness to this tag. I suggest you also read the first paragraph of my description of this tag type in my book as I referenced earlier (NarrativeChildren tag type) for limitations concerning this tag, the need for TMG to be generating a "children of" heading which can be modified, and which heading the tag will affect. However, as I mentioned, if you want to customize and add lists to both TMG Journal reports and Second Site pages, that is much more complex, and only for the adventuresome. Fortunately Second Site will use the Memo field as well as the sentence template. With the special sentence codes to identify output to be hidden from TMG but output only by Second Site, you can include text which will produce an extra Family Section of these non-Primary children in Second Site. I describe this in great detail in my on-line book as My Custom Usage of this special tag type, including the custom Roles and their sentence templates I have added to this tag type. Scroll down from the link above and you will see sections where I describe how to use this tag to enter Second Site Family Sections for any Non-Primary children, with special sections describing when parents have Adopted Children, Step Children, or both. The codes needed for Second Site will depend upon what page format you use, so my descriptions should be taken only as example. This Second Site description is probably more than you want. I would stick with Terry's examples first until you get comfortable with what this very special tag type does.

Hi Judy, The special NarrativeChildren tag type was introduced specifically to deal with this issue. For a given couple you can enter such a tag and override the default heading for their Family section. Now, if you want to get REALLY fancy and complex, you CAN use it to also list step children in addition to Primary/Biological children. But that is a really advanced type of customization. If you are interested see the section on this tag type in my one-line book.

Pat, what exact actions are you doing to add a tag. Your issue is likely different from Walter's.