Michael Hannah

Hi Patrick, I don't use the Family Group report a lot, so don't have a suggestion to avoid the Marriage line. However, there is a workaround that you may find acceptable. You could create a custom tag in the Marriage group, perhaps named "Not Married" and assign the person that tag with no spouse. That will change the Marriage line in the FGS report to the name of that tag. You might even put some text in the date field, maybe "no known marriages", which would be viewed as an irregular date but would print in the date column in the FGS report. By making it a separately named custom tag type you can choose to exclude that tag type from printing in other reports so that it does not appear there, or create appropriate custom sentences. Hope this gives you ideas,

Many users have developed custom Census tags which have the Head of Household (HOH) as the Principal on the tag and all the others in that household as Witnesses. Often these other members of the household are assigned custom roles so that both the HOH narrative and their own narratives can produce appropriate text. You might search using the term "census" on the "Sentence Structures" forum here for lots of ideas. You will find examples from users that define a general purpose single tag to use for all census records, and others that define separate tags for each year's census. This might be more useful than copying. There is no "right" way, just use whatever works best for you and produces the output you desire.

Printing is a Report. Thus my suggestion to run a List of Events reports sorted by place. Such a report could even be filtered for a value in one of the place fields, e.g. Place 5 equals Ohio.

There are probably many different ways to get something like what you want. One way I might try would be a List of Events report. You can choose to output columns for the various Place fields and sort on them, as well as output the event date and the Principals names.

Hi Jeff, I usually let how I want the output to read be the deciding factor in whether I create a custom tag. I take the same approach as Jim, choosing to make a distinction in my mind between what I consider a source of information about an event, and the event itself. I also choose to treat the passenger list as a source and use an appropriate tag to describe the event implied by that source. For example, if they changed residency then I would probably use an Immigration or Emigration tag with a citation to the passenger list source. Or if they only visited, I might simply use a Note tag and construct appropriate text in the memo, again citing the passenger list. Whether to create a custom tag is up to how you want to document this and how you want the output to read. For one example of a custom tag, I have customized the standard Emigration tag so that it is easier for me to use with a passenger list source. I have the Principal being leader of the travel group, and the rest of the group all linked to this one tag as Witnesses with their custom role of emigree. I then use a split main memo to document the name of the Principal on the passenger list along with other information. The separate split witness memo for each member of the party documents their name on the passenger list and their listed relationship to the leader of the group plus other information about them. Principal sentence: [P]<, listed as [M1],> emigrated from [L] [D]< destination [M2]>< along with [R:emigree]>.< [M3]>emigree sentence: [W]<, listed as [WM1],>< as a [WM2]> led by [P1] emigrated from [L] [D]< destination [M2]>.< [WM3]> I also have an equivalent customized Immigration tag if the source is describing arrival instead of departure. Just my way to deal with this type of source, but hope this give you ideas,

Hi Jim, As a follow-up, GEDCOM was not developed to be or intended to be a standard. It was defined by (and the term is reserved by) the Family and Church History department of the LDS church for use by its members to submit genealogy information to the church. Others chose to adopt that definition as a "defacto" standard as a convenient means to share genealogy data in a text file. Many software programs (such as TMG) also adopted it for import and export. In about 2001 the LDS church announced that it would not be defining a new GEDCOM as the existing definition was adequate for its internal needs. It implied that if software professionals needed something newer they should stop looking to the LDS church to modify/update GEDCOM. Since then many professional genealogy groups, especially GENTECH’s Lexicon Working Group, are attempting to develop a modern data interchange model. As I understand it, Bob Velke is a major contributor to that group. For a more complete description of the freezing of the GEDCOM definition, written by Bob Velke, see Dick Eastman's newsletter from Feb 2001 posted here. Hope you find this informative,

As I said earlier "As simply a fellow user I have no insight into the upgrade plans of Wholly Genes..", however... There have been a number of postings suggesting that the report generator is being updated to (at least) deal with 64-bit issues. Your citations of references specifying different reputable journal output standards from what TMG currently produces certainly can't hurt in attempting to encourage Wholly Genes to consider additional report formats. Doesn't hurt to mention and hope.

Hi Barrie, You are doing what should work. I just ran a test "custom format" Journal report on my project for a person with a tag that has a memo but whose sentence does not have the [M] variable. The option of "None" on the Memos worked to suppress that memo. Could you give an example of a tag whose memo still prints and Copy/Paste the tag sentence as an example? Also, are you sure you are looking at the newly created report with the new options and not the old report? I have done that before.

Hi John, One issue, as Jim pointed out, is that a Source Template does not have to have a Date field, so what would TMG sort on? Many of my sources have no date, e.g. family newspaper clippings with no date, or photos with no date, etc. Further, the source element fields that do exist for dates are really just text fields and will simply do alphanumeric sorting, which as you notice is not date sorting. Two workaround alternatives come to mind that you could already use. First, you could add an additional Source Element to your sources where you put an alphanumeric sortable date, perhaps an eight-digit number of YYYYMMDD. You would not need to include that element in your output templates, just use it for holding that date. Then the standard TMG columnar List of Sources report could sort on that field. Another alternative used by many users is to adopt a structured method to construct the Abbreviation and then sort on that field. I don't find the need for your suggestion since I use this to cause Source records to sort exactly as I wish, grouping similar sources together and then sorted as I wish within each group. For example, those sources you wanted to sort by date you could start the Abbreviation with that eight-digit field of YYYYMMDD. As for the order of TMG MSL source numbers in reports, I do not include those numbers for any reports I give to others. I only include them for reports for me, as they simply refer to the number in TMG which is only accessible to me. It does not bother me that they are not in order or have gaps. Hope this gives you ideas,

Yep, that is basically what I understand and tried to say. As Jim said, only an image can be marked primary and only if linked to a person. I can't think of any such situation. And with the flexibility of custom events you can make an event with only one Exhibit and then optionally concatenate another event with the "rest" of the Exhibits, so you could selectively accomplish this as well if you wanted to. Yes, I think you are right. Works for me.

Sheila, I guess I don't understand the issue. If the image is external to TMG, which is how most users store their image files, then you don't add the image twice. TMG is designed to make separate exhibit links to the same image file. You can link that same image to one or more persons and make it primary for any of those people, and to one or more events, and to citations, sources, repositories, and places. Further, by having these separate links, which serve very different purposes, TMG provides the capability of different captions and descriptions for each link. Personally I view being able to have different exhibit links from the same image/file for multiple different purposes as a valuable feature of TMG. Multiple external exhibit links are not multiple copies of the file, they are simply multiple pointers to the same image/file. Further, since an event could have two Principals and multiple Witnesses, for whom should this event exhibit be considered primary? And which event exhibit, since an event can have multiple exhibits? Since currently you can only make primary one of the exhibits links to a single person there is no confusion. And with this TMG design you can still have the same image/file be the primary exhibit for multiple people, all it takes is linking, via the person exhibit link and primary designation, each person to that same file. If you got your wish, for an event with an exhibit that might be linked to multiple people you would have to create some way to tell TMG which one(s) were to use this exhibit link as primary. The separate person exhibit link is simply how you tell TMG about "primary" in a clean and unambiguous way. This is simply the purpose of that kind of link. Just my opinion,

I am just a user of TMG, like Jim and John, but in reading their posts I don't believe there was any intent to flame. In the classic lines of a movie, I think that "what we have here is a failure to communicate". I am guessing that both Jim and John believe they have answered your question, so they don't understand why you keep asking it. Perhaps a new voice (mine) might try again to answer your question? As users we cannot speak for Wholly Genes, but my perception is that this is not a matter of "disallowing" something, but of simply using terms that identify a specific capability among many capabilities. As I have come to understand it, there was a user community desire for there to be a way to designate one, and only one, exhibit/picture to be associated with a person. Why? I would guess that many users had many different reasons for why they might use this feature, but the common wish was for an ability to make that unique designation. The "primary" designation is the tool to provide this capability. Perhaps you are more used to other programs that only provide one way to do something. I am pleased that TMG is generally not that way. For me the beauty of TMG is that it provides me with a toolbox of capabilities so that I can choose among many different ways to do something. It is up to me "why" I choose one way over another. For example, there is a way to link the same exhibit to multiple people, by linking it to an event with multiple witnesses. There is also a separate way to link one exhibit to a person so that only that one exhibit will show with that person, that is by the different method of linking it to the person and making it primary. "Why" you would choose to use one tool over the other is up to you. But "why" different tools exist are simply so that the user "can" do different things. And "why" one tool does it only that one way versus the other tool only doing it that other way is to make it possible to have different ways to do something, and each tool provides that way to do it. In this context, "why" one tool (e.g. primary) "disallows" doing it some other way isn't an issue when there "is" a tool that does it the other way. That method "disallows" the "other" way because by definition it is the tool to do it "this" way. The "why" is so that there are different ways. Maybe the better answer to your "why" question is the classic "why not?" Is there something that this feature is "disallowing" you to do? If you mentioned what you are trying to accomplish, maybe one of us users can suggest a different feature of TMG that will do exactly what you are desiring with an exhibit?

Pat, You are wishing to have one name used in the person's own narrative and a different name in their spouse's narrative of that same tag. As John said, "There is a single name record for each person attached to an event." You can produce the sentences you want, but not with the default sentence variables. If I were trying to do this I would probably use a custom sentence and a split memo. For example, use [M1] for the groom's alternate name and [M2] for the bride's, and [M3] for any general memo text. Assuming you assign their "full legal" names to the Marriage tag you could have a custom sentence something like: Male sentence: [M1] married [PO] <[PARO]>< [D]> <[L]> <[M3]>Female sentence: [M2] married [PO] <[PARO]>< [D]> <[L]> <[M3]> Now enter a memo of: Ike||Nellie||additional memo stuff This custom sentence with the split memo should produce exactly the output you want: Ike married Nellie Pearl Palmer, daughter of blah blah. Nellie married Oscar William Dunford, son of blah blah I would probably retain the default sentences on the Marriage tag and assign these custom sentences to custom roles. However, note that if you assign a custom role to one Principal you must assign a role other than "Principal" to both Principals. Hope this gives you ideas,

Hi Kenny, To get the list of tags needing the "fix" I would suggest running a TMG List of Events report with a filter something like: Any Witness... Sentence (local) Contains blarg END Where "blarg" is the word you are looking for. As for a mass fix, I assume you meant John Cardinal's TMG Utility (not his Second Site program). I looked in the Help pages for his Utility. While the Other > Find/Replace function does seem to be able to change the main Event sentence, it is not clear if this will do a Find/Replace on the Event Witness sentence. You might try it in "Log Only" mode to test it. Maybe some other user who has worked with John's Utility more might know of a way to do such a "mass fix".

Cole, The GEDCOM standard has not been updated for more than 10 years. Most modern genealogy programs like TMG can do things that GEDCOM simply was never designed to record. If you export to GEDCOM you will lose much of the information and linkages that are expressed in TMG because there is no way to describe them in GEDCOM. This is not something missing in TMG, this is caused by lots of capabilities missing in GEDCOM. The fact that GEDCOM does not transfer image files is only one of many, many things that GEDCOM either cannot or does not do. This is why most of us users recommend using TMG backup/restore to share with another TMG user. You can create a new project from a portion of your full project and backup that new small project. Then the other person can restore that small project and either review, copy, or merge information from the small project into their full project. Unless you have built some special external exhibits folder tree, you can specify during backup that the TMG backup/restore include the exhibits. But there is no way to include the exhibits in the GEDCOM export.

Shaun, As Jim mentioned above, you would see no separate filenames for internal exhibits if you looked at the list of files in the TMG backups, but you would see these internal exhibits after you restored from that backup if they were selected to be saved as part of the backup in the first place.

Hi Cole, I agree with Jim that backup/restore of projects or portions of projects is the best way to work with another TMG user on the data in a common project. However, if you are primarily concerned about images, these might be easier to share outside of TMG. Either they could be e-mailed back and forth between each other, or multiple images "zipped" into a single file and e-mailed, or they could be posted on one of the many sites designed to allow you to post photos that others can download. Hope this gives you ideas,

If your exhibits are not in your TMG backups, then I would have to assume you chose to not include exhibits when you did the backups, or there were no exhibits to back up. A TMG backup is a single .sqz file. There is nothing that is going to remove only part (the exhibits) from that one file. If the backups of all your files have no exhibits, then if there were no exhibits on the disk when TMG did its backup the TMG backup obviously would have no exhibits. I cannot imagine anything that TMG could have done to remove your exhibits. You would have had to do that yourself.

What I choose to do is keep a copy of Microsoft Notepad open while working with TMG. Then I can just copy/paste a whole memo into Notepad and refer to it while navigating to other people. This might be easier for you than having two copies of TMG open at once.

Peter, The NarrativeChildren tag is exactly the tool created to deal with this issue. If you have a lot of pairs of people currently in your dataset, one way to add such a tag to all these people at once would be to use John Cardinal's TMG Utility to Add Events. One way I might do this would be to: - Run a List of Events report, filtered to get the spouse pairs of interest, and output this list in CSV format - Do appropriate global Find/Replace actions in this text file to cause it to match the format needed for Add Events in TMGU and any edits needed to set peoples names to the ones you wish to use - Run TMGU (first in log only mode to verify everything) and add all these Narrative Children tags in one action From then on all you need to remember is to add this tag for any pair where you want special names. Hope this gives you ideas,

You are most welcome, Tom. Sounds like you are taking the appropriate next step. I am one user that has not created many indexes so could only do what you are doing and experiment with various settings to see what results occur. The absence of responses sounds like there are few other users with experience in this area either. Good luck, and looking forward to hearing what WG has to say.

You are already outside my personal experience, but I noticed a posting here in the Frequently Asked Questions forum under the Reports area. It talks more about the separate and combined indexes and may help explain what you are seeing.

I have not tried this, but you might test using the location variables rather than text in a modification to the Tag Type sentences. Then you don't have to deal with individual places. This is a guess, but perhaps something like: [iNDEX:]places:[L6],[L5],[L4][:INDEX] added to sentence templates that you are likely to want to index? There are probably only a few of your Tag Types that would need this customization, which (if it works) is a lot less work than custom modifying every sentence or every place. The best way to see if this will work is to try it. Let us know, as I am now curious myself.

In the TMG Help in the topic "Report Options: Indexes" under the section "Creating Index Entries" it mentions the capability to add your own index entries to sentences if the ones automatically generated are not sufficient for your purposes. See: [iNDEX:]index:val1,val2,val3[:INDEX] I have not used them myself, but you might try various forms in a few sentences and test if they give you what you want.

Another option is to leave your citations on the Relationship tags but to exclude those citations. You can exclude a citation either by putting a dash '-' in front of the source number in the Citatiion screen, or right-click the citation in the Tag Entry screen and select "Exclude this citation". Then in your report Options on the Sources tab you can choose whether to show or not show these excluded citations.