John Cardinal

Stewart, I don't know an easy way to find a circular relationship. In the cases I have seen before, Second Site found multiple people who were affected by the problem. I instructed the users to choose a person in that set who is the furthest back in the lineage, and starting from there, look at that person's ancestor tree carefully until you see a parent who was born later. People who are way back in the lineage will have less parents, grandparents, etc., so that reduces the relationships you have to inspect. I just thought of this: you might try using the relationship calculator. Choose the person who you used with the "Is An Ancestor Of" function and set both IDs to that person. See if TMG will report more than the closest relationship (same person). Hmm... another idea would be to generate a pedigree report for that person. Limit it to a certain number of generations, but more than you believe is valid. SO, for example, if you think you have at most 30 generations, set the limit for the report to 40 and see if the tree expand along a certain line and shows duplicate people. That may yield some clues. Given that we don't know for sure that the problem is a circular relationship, I am not sure how much effort I'd expend looking for it. Good luck.

Stewart, Is there any chance that you have a circular relationship defined, i.e., a case where someone is recorded as their own ancestor as a result of a mistake in the parent-child linkage? Second Site has a relationship calculator and after searching ancestors back approx. 1000 generations, it gives up. In all cases where that has happened, the TMG project had a circular relationship. If TMG's "is an Ancestor of" filter is not protected from such a condition, then it may never stop searching...

A discussion list for users of John Cardinal's program Second Site which produces web pages from TMG data. John hosts this group and is an active participant. If you want help or advice about how to get the best out of Second Site, please join this list. Click here to subscribe or unsubscribe to the Second Site mailing list. You need a Google Account to subscribe.

Why would you "lose everything" if a restore fails? You have the database on the other PC, and you have a backup of the current state of the target PC from when you moved that data to the other PC. The extra steps you describe complicate the movement of the data while providing little (if any) extra protection. Good backup practices (backup frequently, save backup files in safe locations, etc.) protect against the rare occurrence of a restore failure and they also insulate against other issues. IMO, therefore, the "father/son" approach isn't worth the trouble. By the way, I have restored hundreds of projects that have been sent to me by TMG users and I have never had one fail. That doesn't mean it won't happen, of course. Also, I follow the same process every time to minimize trouble. I don't use flash drives or other media that might be suspect. (flash drives have a short useful life relative to hard drives, for example.) If I get a backup file on a flash drive I copy the contents to a hard drive before doing the restore. The point is, develop a rationale procedure, test to make sure it works properly, and then follow it. Combined with multiple layers of backup files, you should never "lose everything".

Don't worry. If you have a copy of your TMG project then you have not lost your data. Look for files with the extension "PJC"; that's the main file in the TMG project data. There are other files, too, but finding a PJC file will probably indicate that you have a copy of your data. You can not create a working copy of TMG by copying the contents of its Program Files folder. The install program for TMG puts files in other places, registers certain DLLs, changes the registry, etc. The only way to make a working version of TMG is to via TMG's install program. If your serial number is for a version of TMG that was released in 2005, you might have TMG v5 or TMG v6. In either case, your serial number won't work with the trial version of TMG v7. My advice is to contact Wholly Genes support. They can figure out which version you have and I think they can give you a link to an install program for that version.

Sue, In general, you have to copy your project from your desktop to your laptop, and then back again. To do that, you will need some connection between the two PCs. If you have a home network, you can do it that way. It sounds like you do not have a home network, so perhaps using a thumb drive is best. The most reliable way to make the copy is to use TMG's File > Backup command. Write the backup file (*.SQZ) to a drive on the PC (not the thumb drive). When the backup is complete, copy the SQZ file to the thumb drive. Then eject the thumb drive and insert it into the other PC. Copy the SQZ file to a drive on that PC. Then start TMG and select the Restore command. Be very, very careful to keep track of which PC has the most recently updated project, and never do data entry on the stale project.

That particular page (linked above) is out of date. There have been 16 releases between 2003 and 2008, and they all have been tested on multiple Windows operating systems including Windows 2000, Windows XP, and (lately) Windows Vista. I do not use Vista, but beta testers for TMG Utility have tested it. I do not know if it has been tested on 64bit operating systems; I have not done so. I believe it would work on a 64bit OS but I can't say for certain. TMG Utility will not work on 16bit versions of Windows such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, etc.

Second Site includes Timeline Chart User Items that you can use to create timelines. You designate which people to include on a report and SS will shown each person's lifespan as a graphic on the chart. You can also use TMG's timeline files to add historical information or whatever those files contain. See the Help Page for more information. Also, here's an example chart.

TMG Utility's "Set Living=N" feature works just fine, but your data doesn't match the criteria: it changes the Living flag from "?" to "N", and it will not change invalid entries such as a blank Living flag. You can use a List of People report in TMG to change the Living flag to "?". After that, you might want to use Set Living=N to help correct the cases where Living should be "N", not "?".

If your only output was for Second Site, I don't think you'd need the [:NP:] or [+] codes because SS handles the specific output you mentioned without adding punctuation. With the codes, both SS and TMG will produce the results you want.

John, My tools show the English tag label. If you are working in another language, such as EnglishUK, then the label you see may be different from that. Try changing the English label and see if that helps. If that doesn't help, let me know. TMG's tag label translation facility has some complexity to it and we may need to dig a little deeper...

The record numbers are place record numbers, an internal number used by TMG but not usually visible to end-users. I include them in the log because they are the only unique identifier for place records. There are circumstances where it would be helpful to have the record numbers, but probably only for me, and not for TMG Utility users. You can use the Master Place List in TMG to browse through place records and from there you can find the events that use those records. There is no requirement to add Address tags. You might want to add Address tags if you keep contact information for living people in your TMG project. There are probably other uses for the Adress tag, but that's the main one as far as I know. For other places, such as the location of a BMDB event, the place is entered via the event. So, for example, when you enter a Birth tag, you can enter the place where the birth occurred. In real life, an "address" isn't an event in the same way that a birth, marriage, or death is an event, and so I suspect that typical TMG users don't have many Address events in their projects. I hope this makes sense...

Most reports can be sent to HTML or to a PDF printer (included).

There may be an easy way to do it, but you'll have to try and be more precise about what you want to do. I know it may be hard for you to be precise right now because you are new to TMG. I am going to guess what you want to do regarding the "Record Change" date. In TMG there are tags and tag types. Tags are used to store data about individuals, and tag types are the definitions of the meaning of those tags. It seems that in your project "Record Change is a tag type, and there are many instances of that tag in your data. You can delete the existing tags, but retain the tag type for later use if you want. TMG itself does not have a function to delete tags, but my TMG Utility program (linked below) will do it for you. It's a free utility, very widely used. See the "Delete Tags by Type" feature. Once the tags have been deleted, you can decide to keep or remove the tag type. I don't think you need to keep it; TMG automatically keeps a "Last Edited" data for each person in the project so there is no need to manually keep track of it.

Dick, If the numbers are stored in the Reference field or in Reference events, then the TMG Utility program can remove them for you. You can clear the Reference field easily using the Set Person Field feature: http://www.johncardinal.com/tmgutil/setper...htm#stepbystep3 You can delete specific events based on the event type using the Delete Tags by Type feature: http://www.johncardinal.com/tmgutil/deltagbytype.htm Always make a full backup of your project before you use TMG Utility to make changes to your project. If you need more information about how to use the features mentioned above, let me know.

TMG has dozens of different report formats, and many of those can be output in HTML format. Some people use some form of the Journal report as the basis for a web site. Other people produce GEDCOM files from TMG and then use one of the various GEDCOM-to-HTML methods to create a site. However, I think your overall opinion is correct: Second Site is the best way to convert TMG projects into a full-featured, cross-linked web site with support for sentences, exhibits, citations, sources, name indexes, charts, etc. There is a "try before you buy" option but I do not promote it. You can download the full install program. After you install Second Site, you can run it unregistered and it will build a web site, but the web site is limited to 10 people. If you are interested in downloading a trial version, contact me directly and I will email you the link. It's extremely easy to add links to external pages/sites. You can add them to your basic menus, or you can build pages of links. You can also mingle links to external sites/pages with content you create. Creating custom pages is also very easy, and most users add at least a couple custom pages. Those pages will be integrated with the SS pages in all respects: look, feel, navigation, etc. It's also pretty easy to blend SS pages with pages produced some other way, although in that case, it takes a little more effort to get complete integration of look and feel. It's also easy in SS to restrict the site to a subset of your TMG data. Most of that task is accomplished in TMG. Using TMG's powerful, flexible filtering capabilities you designate the subset you want to include in your site and set a flag value for each person in the set (pretty easy in TMG once you understand the basic steps). Then you tell SS which flag controls inclusion in the site and you are done. SS also includes a filter to exclude living people or you can opt to limit what is shown for living people. I think some of the sites mentioned here on the TMG Forum's list of web sites include other tools. On the other hand, the great majority of Second Site users do not use any other tools. They build a web site completely with TMG and SS. The only other tool involved is FTP, which transfers files from the local PC to the web host. Check out this web page: Six Steps to Second Site It shows the basic steps you have to take to produce a completely functional web site. It's likely you will want to tweak some things before actually publishing the site, but it is the case that some TMG users have published sites with an hour of installing Second Site. They typically add to their site, change it, refresh it, etc., but it's possible to produce a site very, very quickly. This example site was produced solely in Second Site.

I believe that standard genealogical practice is to record information about women using their birth surnames. In TMG, as in life, people can have multiple names, and so it's pretty common for TMG users to add married names for all married women. In some cases, the women may have only gone by their married name after marriage, but in other cultures and times, they did not. So, let's assume we have a girl named Jane born to Mr. and Mrs. Doe: Jane Doe She then marries Mr. Smith. In TMG, you would add a Name-Marr tag, and she would have two names: *Jane Doe Jane Smith You can even add her birth/maiden surname to her Name-Marr record if you want: *Jane Doe Jane (Doe) Smith If you search for her under either name you will find the same person. The "*" indicates her "primary" name, the name by which she will be shown in charts or reports that only display a single name due to space constraints or genealogical precedent/standards. Hope this helps.

Yes, I believe you can do that. In the "c:\Program Files\On This Day\backs" folder you will see a set of JPG images. Replace those with your own images but keeping the same names. It's not very elegant or extensible, but it will work, I think!

My TMG Utility program (link below) has a "Change Place Parts" facility which can help with this task. You define some rules that describe what you want it to do, and then it processes each place according to those rules. So, for example, you could tell it to find every place where the "County" field ends with ", KS". FOr each such place, delete the suffix ", KS" and set the "State" field to "KS". You can do a "dry run" to preview the results before actually changing anything, and if you did, you 'd see the rules above would leave "Girard" in the Country field. Presumably, other places in KS would also have the wrong value in the Country field. You might decide to amend the rule to move whatever remains in the Country field to the "City" field. The rules would be: If Country ends with ", KS"Change Country delete suffix ", KS"And Change City copy CountryAnd Change Country set to "" I suspect that in addition to "Girard, KS" in the Country field, you might also have county names followed by ", KS" in the Country field. Given the rules above, those county names would end up in the City field. You could write some rules to help move those values from the City field to the County field as long as there is something identifiable in the name, like the suffix "Co." or "County" or whatever. Whether or not Change Place Parts will help depends on how many places you have to edit, and how many can be fixed by applying logic like the above. Clearly, it's not worth the effort to write the rule, and test it, to change a single place. If you have dozens of places that a ruyle can fix, well, then taking the time to learn Change Place Parts and test the rules you write is probably worth it. In addition to making many edits quickly, Change Place Parts will be thorough. It won't miss a place that needs fixing because it's tired: well written rules will change every place that meets the filter criteria that is part of the rules. If you have specific questions about how to use Change Place Parts, you can respond here or ask a question on the TMG-L mailing list. I tend to check the mailing list more frequently...

If you create a "Marriage1" tag, you can use TMG Utility to change all the existing Marriage tags to Marriage1 tags. Then you could change the Marriage tag to have the structured memo you described. Ctrl-M would continue to add the Marriage tag, but that would have your customization. I am not sure that's a good idea, however: if you ever add data via a merge, the Marriage tags added from the external dataset/project won't be the same as your customized Marriage tag. I think TMG will handle it properly, but still, it would be confusing. Another alternative would be to add a Marriage1 tag that has the structured memo. Also add a custom button to the user toolbar, and click that button to add the Marriage1 tag. That will minimize the steps it takes to add the customized tag while leaving the standard tag in place.

This topic was discussed recently. See this thread.

CAREFUL, CAREFUL, CAREFUL! If you use any non-realtime, automated facility to synchronize the folders you are opening yourself to a significant data corruption issue. Imagine this scenario: Add event "A" on PC #1 Add citation to event "A" on PC #1 Add event "B" on PC #2 Synchronize folders using Robocopy or whatever Note that event "A" will be lost, and it's possible that the citation to it will be connected to event "B". The citation file from PC #1 will be newer than it's counterpart, but the event file from PC #2 will be newer than it's counterpart. The citation added on PC #1 will survive the merge of the files even though the event to which it applies does not! The database files for TMG projects must be treated as a set. You can not reliably mix files from two different sets without the risk of data corruption. I strongly urge anyone who moves files to always review the list of files that will be moved. Basically, if any file from PC #1 is newer than all the files from PC #2, then you have to accept all the files from PC #1 as most recent, even if there is a file on PC #2 that is newer than its counterpart.

I don't think there is if you add the image as an exhibit attached to the event. You have a single image but multiple exhibits, and TMG is showing you exhibits. If you make a single source for the marriage certificate, and then cite that source, then you will have only a single exhibit. In that case, however, you won't see any exhibits when you look at a list of exhibits for the person; that view does not include sources with exhibits that are cited by events that include the person.

A TMG backup file is a zip file with a filetype of "SQZ". You could probably make one pretty easily: make a zip archive that contains all the DBF, FPT and PJC files in the folder where your TMG v6 project is located. Change the filetype to "SQZ". Then see if TMG v7 will restore it. I think it will. During the trial period, if you attached external exhibits, or customized reports, etc., the simple ZIP file I described above will not include those, at least as I described above. Including those takes a bit more work because you have to know how to create a zip file that includes folder information, includes the right files, and structures them as TMG expects. It's probably possible, but I am not sure I would even try.

First, a disclaimer: my "moderator" status doesn't make my answers official. Being a moderator means I can help administer the forum. I am an experienced user, and I think I gave you the correct answer, but official answers can only come from Wholly Genes employees, and I am not. Like Diane, I don't switch back and forth that often so it's relatively easy for me to remember which PC has the current version. I also backup quite frequently and so I can use the date of the most recent backup on one of the PCs as a guide. Typically, however, if I forget which version is current I use a folder comparison utility I have that lists all the files in two different folders and detects which ones have different dates and/or different sizes. That usually is enough for me to know which version was changed last. Each person in the TMG database has a "Last Edited" field and you can run reports to show which people have changed. The Last Edited field is not all-inclusive because it is at the person level, so if you change a source record only, no Last Edited field will change. On the other hand, in most of your editing sessions you will change something about a person and so Last Edited can be useful as a way to see which project changed most recently. Clearly, none of the above methods is fail-safe. If you are careful, you can avoid trouble, and I have done so for many years. I did get messed up once, but I detected the problem pretty quickly and manually re-did some changes that I had to abandon.