Michael Hannah

Hi John, This is very simple using the TMG Utility but as another user asked from your duplicate post on the Second Site forum, the real question is why you would want to do that?? What are you trying to accomplish?? For any normal use of TMG doing this seems to be very unusual. I would be interested to hear your reasons as I cannot imagine ever wanting to do this. [edit- John explained on the Second Site forum that this action was to provide custom text for use in a very special map facility he has created and added to his genealogy web site. I find his a clever and elegant use of an advanced custom feature.] However, if you really do want to do this... Use the Find/Replace feature of TMG Utility for the Event Memo, and use Pattern Matching along with Variable Replacement. I believe the Find string should be: (^.*$) This Pattern should match the entire contents of the memo. [edit- For future viewers of this thread, the above Find string has been edited/corrected based on John's testing. His reply on the Second Site forum indicated that this does what he needed.] I believe the Replace string you probably want would be: $1 text to be added to the end of the memo The "$1" is the Variable Replacement to insert everything that matched inside the parens from the Pattern Match, which in this case would be the entire current contents of the memo. Whatever follows the "$1"would be the fixed text you want to append to the memo. Be sure to first try this in Log Only mode to verify it does what you want, and remember to always Backup your TMG project first before using the Utility.

Hi Vicus, I don't know how much editing you have already done on this imported data. If it is very little, it may be easier to start over and re-import the file. If you choose the Advanced Wizard for import in Step 1, then in Step 5 you can uncheck "Assume married names". That import option will avoid creating any Name-Marr tags. Then you can use the TMG Utility to create these tags for you and can choose the option to include the marriage date if there is one.

MomSmith, I recommend that you don't wait. Everything about data entry and using TMG 7 works just fine with 64-bit. As I understand it the only things missing are some of the report features and an export issue. I am just a user and cannot speak for WhollyGenes but in previous posts they have indicated they are actively working hard on this last area for 64-bit. However, they have a policy of never specifying when (or even officially promising if) a new feature will be released. You could be getting your files up to date now using TMG with all its aspects of data entry. As for output, many people prefer creating web pages (especially using the companion program Second Site) instead of producing printed reports and don't find this temporary lack a big issue.

If you did save the file as a true ANSI format text file, then there is no harm to simply use Windows to rename the file and change the filename extension to be ".ged" by removing the trailing ".txt"

I am not familiar with the import options, but adding a Name-Marr tag to people in a TMG dataset is very easy with John Cardinal's TMG Utility, and it will copy the marriage date to use as the date for this tag. See more about this donorware Utility here.

Using a text file editor, like Notepad, check somewhere near the beginning of the file for a line that starts with: 1 CHAR If you have re-saved the file and are sure it is ANSI, make sure this one line is: 1 CHAR ANSI If it is not, and you are sure the file is ANSI, then edit the file and change that line and save it again.

Jane, This issue with UFT-8 is mentioned in the TMG Help in a box at the bottom of the topic GEDCOM Import. See also a comment from Wholly Genes in this forum here. However, if all you want to do is look at the GEDCOM, it is a text file. You can open any true GEDCOM file in any editor that will handle straight text (and whatever character set it was saved in, like UTF-8). I typically open and review GEDCOM files in Notepad or WordPad. Since these programs have search capabilities I can usually find whether they include what I expect before I bother to import them into TMG. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hi Jon, The whole purpose of the TMG report system is to construct multiple kinds of reports and sentences from the bits of text and many variables that you provide. As Paul has tested, double spaces in the internal text you provide seem to remain. I have been told that current standards for electronic output at the end of sentences defaults to a single space. (Yes, I am old enough to have taken a typing class too where I was told to enter two spaces, but a recent word processing class I reviewed specified to only enter one space at the end of a sentence, and then use options in the word processing package to define how lines, words and sentences are spaced. While I am not sure this is progress, this is reality. Sigh!) Like word processing options, many TMG reports have an option to tell TMG how many spaces to use between the sentences it constructs. For example, on the Individual Narrative report, see the Miscellaneous tab and you can specify the number of spaces that TMG will produce between sentences for that report. Hope this helps understand what is happening.

Hello Helmut, I understand your "wish" to have any Tag in the Birth group always come before any Tag in the Death group if they have the identical Sort Date. That would probably be a convenient enhancement. However as you have noticed, with the current program you cannot rely on the order of Tags that have identical Sort Dates. You might get "lucky" in getting the order you desire, possibly based on the order that the Tags were added, but even that is not guaranteed. I have made it a habit to always modify Tags with identical Dates to have different Sort Dates that ensure the Tags fall in the order I prefer. It may be inconvenient, but at least you can specify their order.

Hi Evelyn, I would like to try to help. Could you provide more details about "exactly" what text fields in what TMG tags do not transfer into other software? The more detail of how/where it is entered in TMG the better. Further, for your own testing, realize that a GEDCOM file is simply a text file. So you can open the export file that TMG creates in something like Notepad and search for the text you expect to see. Then you can copy and paste the exact lines in that GEDCOM file which do not get into the other software.

Michele, Is it possible that you consistently have a tag for all your people that have the parents as Witnesses? For example, some people have customized their Birth tag and made the parents Witnesses. If so, you could "temporarily" modify the global tag sentence to include the variables [AE] for the age of the child and [RE:Mother] for the age of the person assigned the custom role "Mother". Then you could print an Individual Narrative report of selected people and only select this one tag (plus possibly also the Baptism tag) to output. Scanning that report might be easier? Hope this gives you ideas.

Glad that works for you. The advantage for me is that I do not have to "choose between parents" as your mother mentioned; you get to have both.

This is an issue that has been discussed quite a lot, and one I particularly care about as I am adopted. You might first check the forum topic on Adoption sentences for some suggestions. For cases just like yours I have developed a custom method of creating two people entries in TMG for the single human. One "TMG person" covers the events in that human's life up to adoption using their pre-adoption name, and the other "TMG person" covers the events after adoption using their subsequent name. I then have a custom tag that links these two "TMG people" together with an appropriate sentence. Each "TMG person" can then be linked as Primary to the appropriate set of parents, and thus will show in each set of parents' list of children. For example, Mary (born) Smith shows in the Smith family, and Mary (now) Jones shows in the Jones family. This also works nicely in Second Site as the custom linking tag provides a quick link between these two sets of events and "people". And you can make the sentences for each "TMG person" read in whatever way makes sense to you. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hi Kristina, Yes, you are likely to get lots of suggestions but a feature I find very useful in TMG is custom Flags. You might review Terry's Tips about creating a Related-by flag that identifies the people in the dataset that are directly related to you. Perhaps some variation on that flag would be of use to you. If you are publishing basic data by sending someone a GEDCOM file, or using Second Site to publish your own site on the web, or even just printing reports, you can use such a flag to output only those people with specific values of that flag. It makes it easy to restrict your output to specific people. Most people recommend keeping those people in branches in your dataset even if they are only somewhat related. Often you will find later some marriage or other link that causes that branch to be more closely related than you thought. But as with all things in your dataset, it is strictly a matter of personal preference. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hi Mike, I am just a volunteer moderator of this Forum and cannot speak for Wholly Genes, but your Topic subject asks about "Upgrade Options". If you check Wholly Genes main web site for upgrades here you will see there is a price break only for upgrading from Version 6. The price for Version 5 or earlier is the full price. Your version, with a copyright of 1998 (eleven years old!) is either Version 3 or Version 4 (it should say which on the CD). So I wouldn't worry about finding your serial number for a special upgrade price. As for importing your existing data, the current Version 7 Help documentation says: "You can import TMG 4.x or earlier files, which have a file extension of .TMG, or TMG backup files, which have a file extension of .SQZ." Thus you should have no problem getting your existing TMG data into the current Version. As for your error message, I don't have a copy of a version that old, so can't test it myself. Wholly Genes support staff, or another user with experience in trying older versions will have to help you with that. Be aware that there are a lot of new features and capabilities with the latest version. Compared to your old version the latest looks and acts like a whole new program. There are a number of differences and a bit to learn, but feel free to ask questions. There are many users of TMG subscribed here who are happy to try to help.

An alternative method might be to have the Primary Name-Var with the Given Name entered as "[withheld]" (including the brackets). For me that would make the situation more clear. I would suggest also having a second Name-Var for your records with the actual Given Name entered as "{Walter}". Then if you chose print options to print sensitive data, you could have a report with that name. And later, when either the person dies or changes his mind to allow use of his name, you can simply change which Name-Var is Primary. Lots of different ways to handle this.

This is an excellent way to work together on a family genealogy, but it takes great discipline. Assuming you both have TMG, you could do this but it must be done very carefully to keep everything synchronized. There are many ways to do that, what follows are just two suggestions. I would recommend having one of you assigned as maintaining the "master" project. In that master you could create a Flag that would identify which of you was working on which person, maybe values of "?, J, M" where '?' is the default, and 'J' for James and 'M' for Mary. Based on that flag and the secondary output of a List of Persons report you could create new (sub)projects for each of you to work on. I would highly recommend you not try to work on the same people at the same time. Doing that is what causes synchronization problems. Then these subprojects could be opened and a backup produced to ship to each other. When one of you has done a first cut, then they ship the latest subproject backup to the other for review. When you both agree, the subproject is merged (very carefully) into the master project. Alternatively, one of you could agree to do all the data entry into the master database. Then you could use the flag mentioned above and Second Site to produce web pages for each subset of people. Then you just e-mail detailed notes about proposed changes back and forth to each other until the one doing the data-entry catches up with the changes and produces a new set of web pages. While TMG is designed to let you put the project on a single server and have both of you login to that server and both work on it at once, this is probably not feasible if you are on opposite sides of the continent. There are advantages and disadvantages with these and any collaboration methods. You will need to decide what works best for you and your brother. Good luck, and be very rigorous with your agreements on how you will both work.

Your memo idea is an excellent way to deal with more complicated cases. Glad my ideas helped.

Patsy, If you are only interested in having the death of the spouse in the narrative, you might consider customizing the Death tag type and adding a widow(er) role for the spouse. Then if you set the Journal Report Options on the Tags tab to output "All events and witnessed events" the spouse witness sentence will be output in appropriate chronological order. Using the gender specific feature of the Witness roles you might have something like the following for the "widow(er)" role sentences: Male: [W] became a widower when his wife [PF] died<[D]>.< [WM]><[M0]>Female: [W] became a widow when her husband [PF] died<[D]>.< [WM]><[M0]> Hope this gives you ideas,

Hello Helmut, I don't claim to be an "experienced genealogist" but will attempt some comments anyway. First, most people seem to recommend entering the date as shown in the documentation and/or as used at the time of the event in the location of the event. You can then adjust things if you wish in TMG using the Sort Date to cause the events to sort appropriately. However, you actually asked two very different questions: As stated in Elizabeth Shown Mills' Evidence Explained on page 353, section 7.38, for old documents: "the cited year is usually not the modern calendar year. It may be Old Style (Julian Calendar) year that ran from Ladyday (March 25th) of one year to the eve of Ladyday in the next year (March 24th). Occasionally, it will represent a year running from Easter of one year to Easter Eve of the next." On page 89, section 2.75, in the topic Citing Dates she further states: "During the long transition from the Julian Calendar to the modern Gregorian Calendar, many English and American documents used a system of double-dating... In this practice, the date '1 February 1732/3' would be 1732 under the Julian Calendar and 1733 under the Gregorian Calendar." TMG permits using this system of double-dating for Julian/Gregorian, and chronologically sorts these events correctly. See the TMG Help under the entry "Date Format' subtopic "Old Style Dates". You can also set what range of years TMG expects are "Old Style" in Preferences > Program Options > General. I believe that the use of this double-dating, when appropriate, will be understood by most genealogists. Certainly for citations I would use the date from the document but likely use this double-dating if I knew that the calendar used by the document was Julian and the date occurred in those first months of the year when there is ambiguity. Again, most seem to recommend entering the date as found in the documentation. So in TMG I would enter "3rd Sunday after Trinitatis" in the Date field which TMG will consider an irregular date, but in the Sort Date I would put the date converted to day and month and year so it will sort appropriately. Finally, if you have a TMG dataset where you have data and events from many different locations where the Calendars used differed for those locations, but want to sort these events in a common narrative, I would probably adopt some personal data entry convention for myself. For example, I would enter in the TMG Date fields according to the calendar used for that event in that location, but probably convert all TMG Sort Dates to modern Gregorian to ensure that all the events would sort in the narrative in true chronological order. Others may have different suggestions. The beauty of the TMG Sort Date is that you can put whatever makes sense for report output in the Date field but then put something different in the non-printing Sort Date and not have to worry about how the Date entry text will sort. (Note that you must have TMG set to Advanced mode to be able to access Sort Dates.) Hope this gives you ideas,

TMG opens as a single window on your monitor. Inside that single window can be several sub-windows. And various sub-windows pop up within that main window as needed, such as the report definition sub-window. Perhaps those sub-windows are currently bigger than the main window and thus cut off by that main window? If this is what is happening, you can use the mouse at the sides or corners of these sub-windows to resize each of them smaller so they will fit and move them around within the main window. Once you have moved and re-sized them, use the Layout feature to save this new layout of sub-windows with some new name you choose so that TMG will look like this again when you reopen it the next time.

Hi Chris, I applaud you for "thinking outside the box" and setting up "pseudo" relationships, which is something I often do. And I am fascinated by your research as one branch of my family were apprentice chairmakers in Bristol. However, I think you have a level of complexity that may be beyond TMG. I am familiar with some "relationship" software packages that are designed to do what you are attempting, especially creating the charts you desire. Some of the best are used by intelligence and law enforcement but those organizations are using them to track criminal or foreign intelligence affiliations rather than apprentice feltmakers. The most widely used is a software product called "Analysts Notebook', but there are others. Even though I am one who often stretches TMG with "unnatural acts", with the quantity of people and the multiplicity of relationships you are trying to track I think you are stretching TMG a bit too far. However, I have done a little experimenting with importing TMG data into such programs. The ability to set FLAGs in TMG with specific values to assign attributes for such people greatly enhances this process. Then using TMG's filters based on such FLAGs to output a List of People report in CSV format with their attribute flags is often an appropriate input format for such relationship programs. Some ideas that may help in TMG. You might consider not trying to link the "real" people. Instead create one kind of "pseudo person" that was a "master" and a different kind of "pseudo person" that was an "apprentice" and use these "pseudo people" to construct your relationships and charts. A custom tag could link the "real" people to these "pseudo" people, but these pseudo people could be father/son. A "real" person that had multiple apprenticeships could give rise to multiple such "people" thus avoiding the one father/son relationship, but some kind of naming scheme might help you relate the multiple instances of apprentice "people" to the one "real" person. Hope this gives you ideas. Good luck. Your efforts sound most interesting.

Hi Derek, There must be something else going on, as I cannot reproduce your symptoms. Could you check the sentences of this tag again? Perhaps there is a multiple language issue? Is your Note tag sentence in one language but your report output specified in another? Is your Male sentence different than your Female sentence? Something must be set differently for you as the tag sentence should give what you specify.

While you were unclear in what you were asking, both Paul and Jim are correct. When you say "load the saved list" and then "clear the filter screen" are you talking about loading an existing filter into the Project Explorer (PE)? or loading a filter into a Focus Group? or choosing a defined filter for a filtered group on a Report definition? While the details of each are a bit different, in any of these cases if you "clear" the defined filter criteria then whatever you now define will operate on the complete database. However, if after you load the filter you then "modify" that filter by adding further criteria as "AND" with a possible need for some parentheses, then the entire filter will still operate on the complete database but have the effect of filtering the filtered list. Otherwise, follow Jim's advice to duplicate the original filter to define a filtered group in a List of Persons report and set the Secondary Output of that report to set a flag to a specific flag value for these people. Then whether you are using the PE or a Focus Group or another report, your first filter criteria can be the value of the flag and further criteria can be "AND" with this flag. Hope this gives you ideas,

You are most welcome