Michael Hannah

2 hours ago, TrinityB said:

I found that out Hoping to avoid so many different tag entries for each one document.

Trinity,

As Jim and Terry note, it is also not clear to me what you are asking.  You indicate that the information is " in the Memo field for a "Death" tag".  Putting such information in the memo of a tag is not typically how such information is recorded in TMG.  The typical way to enter information about a Death Certificate is by creating a Source Citation to a Source Record which is that certificate.  Then all the appropriate information from that certificate is entered as part of that citation, not in the tag memo to become narrative output.  One may choose to extract some limited information from the certificate, such as the cause of death, to include in the narrative sentence about the death, but seldom would one include all the information in the narrative.

Since death certificates differ a lot depending upon what year they were issued or where they were created, most people don't bother with creating some standard structure for entering whatever information may be available on that specific certificate.  Usually that information is just entered, free form, in either the Citation Detail field or the Citation Memo field of the citation to the Death tag.  I have constructed all my custom Source Templates to always allow for information to be entered in either the CD or CM or both.

As examples, I have designed two custom Source Types to record death information.  Usually I am only able to locate a Death Register where some of the information you mention is recorded for multiple people, and use a specific Source Type for that.  On rare occasions I am actually able to obtain or view a copy of an actual individual Death Certificate, and have a separate Source Type for that.

These two custom Source Types are both described in detail in my on-line book:

https://www.mjh-nm.net/SRCTMPLS.HTML#DeathRegister

 and https://www.mjh-nm.net/SRCTMPLS.HTML#DeathCert

The Source Templates of both Source Types have a number of conditional Source Elements to identify the specific register or collection of death certificates where this certificate is located, but do not include the fields you mention as Source Elements.  Instead for either Source Type I identify the specific record entry or certificate in the Citation Detail field, and just enter all the other information the record or certificate may have in the Citation Memo. 

As is typical, I only entered the cause of death in the memo of the Death tag for my 2nd great-grandmother, Rachel G. Elwell.  That tag sentence produces in her narrative only:

Mrs. Rachel G Smith died of Cardiac Dropsey on 23 Jun 1902 in Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana at age 76 years, 5 months and 24 days.

But there are two citations to this Death tag using both of the above described Source Types: one a Death Register entry, and one her Death Certificate.

-----------------------------

Using the Death Register Source Type for the Death Index for Indiana I have the following:

CD= book H-5, page 85, Rachel G. Smith

CM= Female; White; Died: 23 Jun 1902 in Delaware County, Indiana; Age: 76

That produces a Full Footnote of:

Death Index; Indiana; 1882-1920: book H-5, page 85, Rachel G. Smith. Female; White; Died: 23 Jun 1902 in Delaware County, Indiana; Age: 76.

-----------------------------

Using the Death Certificate Source Type for her certificate in Indiana viewable on-line I have the following:

CD= Year: 1902; Roll: 03, image 1915/2786, stamped page 80, Record Number 98, Rachel G. Smith

CM= Place of Death: 2714 S. Liberty St, Center Township, Delaware County. Sex: F. Color: W. Widow. Husband: none. Date of Birth: Dec 30, 1825. Age: 76 y, 5 m, 4 d. Occupation: none. Birthplace: Ohio. Place of Death: Delaware Co., Ind. Father: Mahlon Elwell; birthplace: N. J. Mother: Martha Mills; birthplace: Wales. Informant: Mrs. Geo Porter, 2724 S. Liberty. Died: June 23, 1902, at 10 o'clock P.M. Chief cause: Cardiac Dropsey, for 2 years. Burial: Bluffton, Ind. on June 25, 1902. Undertaker: R. Marks & Sons, Muncie, Ind.

And that produces a Full Footnote of:

Death Certificates, 1899-2011; Indiana: Year: 1902; Roll: 03, image 1915/2786, stamped page 80, Record Number 98, Rachel G. Smith. Place of Death: 2714 S. Liberty St, Center Township, Delaware County. Sex: F. Color: W. Widow. Husband: none. Date of Birth: Dec 30, 1825. Age: 76 y, 5 m, 4 d. Occupation: none. Birthplace: Ohio. Place of Death: Delaware Co., Ind. Father: Mahlon Elwell; birthplace: N. J. Mother: Martha Mills; birthplace: Wales. Informant: Mrs. Geo Porter, 2724 S. Liberty. Died: June 23, 1902, at 10 o'clock P.M. Chief cause: Cardiac Dropsey, for 2 years. Burial: Bluffton, Ind. on June 25, 1902. Undertaker: R. Marks & Sons, Muncie, Ind.

-----------------------------

Hope this gives you ideas,

Michael

Art,

The number one problem I have heard reported with TMG and Win10 is caused by the insistence of Microsoft to automatically include their cloud backup program OneDrive.  From my personal experience it is well worth the effort to follow available on-line instructions to at least disable if not totally remove that program from your Win10 computer.  If OneDrive is running at some point it WILL interfere with TMG.

On 7/19/2019 at 1:56 PM, John Tippet said:

The link you supplied talks about Unlinking OneDrive or Hiding or Unistalling OneDrive.  Which options should I select?

It depends upon your version of Windows.  On some versions Microsoft prevents you from installing it.  You could try to uninstall and if that is not allowed with your version follow the Microsoft page's instructions on hiding, which is what Jim instructed.

John,

I completely agree with Jim.  I believe random crashes have always been found to be other programs working in the background randomly accessing some of the many files used by TMG while TMG is running.  As Jim noted, this is not a TMG issue, it is bad design of the program "messing" with TMG's files.  There have been repeated reports of allowing OneDrive to have anything to do with TMG files causing problems.

Some people like to have OneDrive back up their files onto Microsoft's cloud.  In that case, first configure OneDrive to have nothing to do with all of TMG's files and folders.  Then manually do a TMG backup and copy/move that TMG SQZ file to a folder monitored by OneDrive so it now will copy that file to Microsoft's cloud.  Others, like myself, have completely removed OneDrive from our computers so none of our files reside on Microsoft's cloud, and do our own separate backups.

For suggestions on various options to disable or remove OneDrive you might start with this Microsoft support page:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0

Hope this gives you ideas,

Michael

On 7/18/2019 at 9:12 AM, Paul Leger said:

Then I thought okay what if I select all of the focus group individuals first and then add 1 descendants...

Glad you recalled my directions to:
"Select All" the people now in this Focus Group, uncheck Ancestors, and Check Descendants BUT set the number to only ONE...

The Focus Group actions of Add Descendants, Ancestors, and Spouses only work on the selected people in the current Focus Group. That is the key.

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So that worked. Thanks guys. I wouldn't have figured it out without you.

You are most welcome, Paul, glad to hear you got what you wanted.

Michael

Another option, Paul, is to create a Focus Group of the desired people, since once you select a set of people you can add ancestors or descendants as desired.  If I understand what you want, I would start with a Focus Group of only the one person and select (click on) them.  Now check only Ancestors and set the Generations  number high (e.g. 250) and Add them.  That gets all the person's ancestors.  Next "Select All" the people now in this Focus Group, uncheck Ancestors, and Check Descendants BUT set the number to only ONE so you only get the children of all these ancestors (including the children of the person).  After you Add those children you may wish to "Select All" the people now in this Focus Group, uncheck Descendants, and check Spouses to get all these people's spouses.   You could "Save" this Focus Group to some name, or simply do the Export now and in "Step 4 Export what people" choose "People in the Focus Group"

Hope this gives you ideas,

Carol,

As others note, if you include external exhibits in your backup, all these exhibit files will be loaded into the one .sqz file.  The free space on your disk file is not the issue.  There is a max limit in the Operating System for the size of a single file, i.e. the .sqz file.  That limit is much less than your 1.5TB free space.  The options on compression affect how much smaller a single file loaded into the .sqz file can be made so that the total size of .sqz hopefully can be smaller than the sum of the sizes of all the files stored in that one file.  "None" says to do no compression, so the full sizes of all files are loaded into .sqz and thus would result in the largest .sqz file of all the options.  The problem appears to be that no matter what type of compression you choose, including all the external exhibit files within that one .sqz file makes it too large for the Operating System to handle.

As you have noted, the solution is to backup your external exhibits separately and not include them in the .sqz file.

Hope this makes things clearer,

A TMG project consists of more than two dozen files, of which the .pjc file is only one and has very little actual data in it.  No program other than TMG should be touching any of these project files while that project is open in a running TMG program.  Corruption of any one of these files can potentially corrupt the usability of the entire project.  If the backup program is configured to not attempt to copy any of the project files until TMG is closed, then as I said before, that should be okay.

On 5/20/2019 at 5:30 AM, LeMans844 said:

I rarely do an internal TMG back up of the project as its is backed up on the fly to cloud...

Dave, I am concerned about your comment about backing up TMG files "on the fly".  If you have some program backing up TMG files while TMG is running this will some day be a problem.  Such a backup scenario is the major cause of corruption of TMG projects.  However, if the backup does not occur while TMG is running but you wait until you exit TMG and then invoke the program to backup TMG files to the cloud, then that should be okay.

Thanks, Susan,

I did understand that the workaround was unfiltered spreadsheet output, i.e. all witnesses.  However, I was unaware (or had forgotten) that the LOW output columns cannot show a non-standard Flag.  Yes, please update me if you discover any other "speed bumps".

See the two new entries in my Bugs document starting here:

https://www.mjh-nm.net/BUGS.HTML#B103

Let me know if you have suggestions to improve the wording.

Thanks. Jim, I will add a comment about this filter error to my "bugs" document, with your suggestion of using spreadsheet output as a work around.

Okay, Jim, any other ideas?

Jim,

I think the tests run showing problems with larger data size may point to an issue with filter routines.

I note that when TMG runs a filter, a window pops up which reports constructing all possible conditions.

If

• these "all possible conditions" are being written to a Temp file, and
• the software library being used to match possibilities against that file is written as 16-bit functions,

then

• the file could get too big for 16-bit functions to process against?

Do you have any insight from the code as to whether filtering might use an old 16-bit library?

You raise a good point.  If one only wants to see these special historical events on screen, then timelines will do that.  But if one wants the event to output in a report then true event tags are required, and History tags can serve that purpose.

Your question about timelines made me look closer at them as I had not done so for several years.  I also had failed to include their description in my on-line book.  A more careful and complete description of Timelines has now been included there.  See:

https://www.mjh-nm.net/STYLE.HTML#DisplayTimelines

Hope this gives you better ideas on using Timelines.

36 minutes ago, dorisw said:

Thank you, Michael, for that valuable info about beesoft. I had no idea. Also am I correct in stating that the History tag does not transfer via Gedcom or direct software to other companies (in case you ever need to leave TMG)?

Doris

Glad you found the information about Timelines valuable, Doris.

Yes, you are correct about History tags and GEDCOM.  GEDCOM requires that any tag be assigned to at least one Principal, and does not understand Witnesses who are the only links to History tags.  While the TMG Enhanced GEDCOM Export option can include non-standard entries to identify Witnesses, those custom entries must be part of a tag which has at least one Principal.   Since History tags have no Principals there is no GEDCOM construct to output such tags.  They are only one of several types of TMG data which have no way of being output to GEDCOM.

Other software that uses direct import of TMG databases "could" choose to import History tags and convert them to "something" in their program.  But that is up to each such software and not guaranteed.

Two items I failed to note above.

In Lee's list of Timeline files I mention, there are several files whose row is marked with a green dot.  These files came with your TMG installation and were installed in a "timeline" folder where the program itself was installed.  Each timeline consists of two database files: *.DBF and *.DBT, and a Word file *.DOC which describes the timeline events in the file.

If you want to use one of these timelines, copy all three files from this program folder to your project's timeline folder.  That way you can edit the timeline events without altering the original timeline database.

Based on the comments by Morbius the timeline files already on the computer with their names beginning with VAWVCO.* will probably be of interest.  As that timeline's .DOC file says, it includes the events of the formation of Virginia and West Virginia counties and Virginia independent cities.

I said above about timeline events:
"Their extremely useful special feature is that TMG will automatically only show a timeline event in the Details of a person if its date is within that person's lifespan."

That is not completely accurate.  Some timeline events may be entered leaving the month and/or day zero.  This implies a "circa" date for the year which will mean the event will display in the person's Details plus or minus the number of years from the person's birth or death as set for the meaning of circa in Preferences // Current Project Options // Advanced

Hope this gives you further ideas,

Hi Morbius,

History event tags and Timeline files were designed for two very different purposes.  Based on your example uses I believe you probably want to use Timelines instead of History tags.

History tags were intended to be used to document events which directly involved some number of people, with no one person Principal to the event.  These tags are designed to have sentences to output in narratives, Dates, Locations, and source citations like any other event involving a person.  These events will display in the Details of every person who is linked as a Witness to the event, regardless of whether the date of the event is within the lifespan of that person.

Timelines were intended to simply insert the names of a group of related events into a person's Details according to the dates of those events.  These events do not have Locations or Citations, only a descriptive name and date.  Their extremely useful special feature is that TMG will automatically only show a timeline event in the Details of a person if its date is within that person's lifespan.

You can collect a group of event names and dates into a file, such as a timeline file for West Virginia, which identify creation of the state and formations of all the counties.  You could then either globally turn on/off the display of that set of timeline events, or link that set of timeline events to only display for selected people.  Even then timeline events will not display unless you check the option to show timelines in Preferences // Program Options // Tag Box.

The TMG Timeline Manager (under Tools) is a bit awkward to use to create a set of events for a timeline file.  But if the number of events is small it is quite adequate since you only enter a date and event name.  As an aid there are several timeline files which users have created for various topics that can be downloaded into the project's Timelines folder.  See the list of timeline files collected by Lee Hoffman on his TMG Tips site:

http://www.tmgtips.com/timelines.htm

There also is a FREE utility built specially to make it easier to make and use timelines for your project. It is by BeeSoft who make PathWiz!  Last I looked at this utility was at Version 3, which offered a number of features to help you create and manage your TMG timeline files by enabling timelines restricted to particular TMG person numbers in 3 ways:
. individually
. via an entered list
. using the persons in a Focus Group

The program also offers a 'check' box to allow a view of the filter parameters from the ini file before proceeding with a run. Default setting is 'off''.

http://beesoft.soho.on.net/BeeSoft/Timeliner/index.html

Hope this gives you ideas,

Sure you can, Anita,

To find all events which contain the search text, use a filtered List of Events report.  For example, if you were looking for the text GWORP, one of your filter conditions would be:

Memo // Contains // GWORP

You can also further restrict the report with other filter conditions.  Use appropriate output columns to specify the Principals of each event and appropriate columns to identify each specific event.

Alternatively to simply find people who have any event with this search text, use a filtered Project Explorer.  A filter condition could be:

Any Event... // Memo // Contains // GWORP

That will find people with such an event, but will not tell you which of their events has this memo text.

Hope this gives you ideas,

In addition to Terry's suggestion about looking at the Journal report, I recommend looking at Terry's web pages about tricks to produce publishable output.  He has a number of suggestions and advanced customizations which can cause TMG to produce very readable narratives.  See:

https://tmg.reigelridge.com/publishable.htm

Quote

(After I posted the original message in this thread, I figured out how to change the default, so I hope that won't happen again!)

What did you figure out?  Depending upon what you did this may happen again!!

Quote

I have a flag for a particular family not related to me. Let's call that the SMITH GROUP... Report, List of People, Filtered group, User Filter 1 (for example), Add(?), find the SMITH GROUP...and then what do I use for "Value"?

When you define a new custom Flag (SMITH GROUP) every person in the dataset now has this Flag along with all the other Flags defined in this dataset.  The idea of a Flag is that some people will be assigned one value, and others some other value. When you defined the new Flag you gave it a comma-separated list of values, such as (?,N,Y).  The first value in the list is the default value to assign.  Thus when you defined the new Flag every person in the dataset was assigned the first value in this list, and every new person added to the dataset will be assigned this first/default value.  A person can only have one of the possible values assigned to them at any time.  It is assumed that you will take some actions to assign a non-default value to "some" people in order to identify them as different from "the rest of" the people with the default value.

You can use the Filter on a List of People report to identify people where a given Flag is assigned a particular value.  So the "Value" that you use in this filter is the one value among the list of possible values which you have assigned to the people you wish to separately identify.

Quote

I'm getting a message, "178 qualified people found. Are you sure you want to change CONNECTED #1 flag to "Y" for these people?"

You are getting this message because you have set certain Report Options on this report definition. In the Report Definition Screen, click on Options and then click on the Secondary Output tab.  The above message says that you have checked the "Change Flag" option for this report, and specified a "CONNECTED" Flag as the Flag to be changed.  If you only want a list of the people with a specific value of the "SMITH GROUP" Flag, then that "Change Flag" option should not be checked.  While you are in the Options, click on the "Output Columns" tab and be sure that you have selected appropriate fields for output in the columns of the report.

Now if you "OK" the Report Options you should be able to Create the Report, sending it to whatever destination (e.g. the Screen Preview) that you wish for the output.

Hope this helps answer your questions,

As a note, for various reasons if you wish to separate into paragraphs, put [:CR:] (and optionally [:TAB:] ) at the beginning of a sentence, not at the end.  In some cases the carriage return or tag at the end of a tag's output can be stripped.  It "shouldn't" matter, but it does, so be warned.

Two years ago you had this same problem with this same report.  That time a report reset fixed your problem.  You might try that action again to see if it fixes it again.

Hi Judy,

It is not clear what you mean by the ZIP files appearing to be identical.  I don't know what utility you are using to view the ZIP files, but I use Microsoft's WinZIP program.  There are some things to compare other than simply the names and numbers of the files within the ZIP.  WinZIP has two columns to compare between the two ZIP files which it labels "Size" and "Packed".  "Size" is the original size of that individual file before it was compressed to be included in the ZIP file.  "Packed" is the now reduced size of the file within the ZIP after compression.  There is also a column labeled "Ratio" which indicates how much the size of that particular file was able to be compressed.  Perhaps the amount of compression is different between the two ZIP files?  One of the very last Steps in the TMG Backup Wizard is to choose the type of Compression to use.  Could you have changed that?

Hope this gives you ideas,

Michael

I agree with Jim's original suggestion.  I use a "Can" type of Relationship tag for this kind of information, but make sure NOT to set that candidate parent Relationship tag as Primary for the child.  Note that the "Can" Relationship tag type is a custom tag type, so you have to add that type to the Tag Type List if you have not already done so.  In Tools // Tag Type List, click the Add button.  In the Tag Group, click the button for "Parent/child relationship".  Now set the Label to "Can".  TMG will propagate the Tag Type List with all the many Father-Can, Mother-Can, Son-Can, Dau-Can, variations automatically.  Now you can add such a tag type, cite sources to this tag, and include a memo.  In most TMG reports, and in SecondSite, you can select to output these memos, but these tags do not produce sentences.

Hope this gives you ideas.