John Cardinal

Daryl, I am glad you are planning to use Second Site to publish your genealogy data. I am the author. You can import your GEDCOM file into the UK edition of The Master Genealogist (TMG), and once you do that, you will be able to use Second Site. Second Site reads the TMG data files directly. If you are currently using a different genealogy program, you may want to consider using TMG's "GenBridge" feature to import that program's data files directly into TMG. As I said, TMG will import a GEDCOM file, but the GenBridge method usually produces a better result. I can not describe the differences between the Silver version and the Gold version. Either version will work with Second Site.

Nick, No problem. I wanted to make sure (A) that you knew what the program does in terms of sources and citations and ( that there wasn't some issue with sources/citations that I needed to learn.

Nick,Second Site includes citations and sources. What do you mean by "endnotes", if not citations and/or sources?

Sorry, Teresa, there isn't. If you change the Date field, you can automatically copy the date value to the sort date field, but that's the only intra-field capability in the Find and Replace feature.

In the latest version of TMG Utility you can do Find and Replace operations on dates. You can limit the change to a specific type of event. I ran a test where I had: Field: Event Sort Date (Regular only) Find what: 1880 Replace with: 1 jun 1880 In Events: Census1880 Contents must match exactly: True And the result was: -------------------P1, Event Sort Date#919, '1880', '01 Jun 1880' (R)#5484, '1880', '01 Jun 1880' (R)#8404, '1880', '01 Jun 1880' (R)#10786, '1880', '01 Jun 1880' (R)#20992, '1880', '01 Jun 1880' (R) You have to be careful to set the options as I have them above. The "Contents must match exactly" checkbox shoudl be checked, or you'll change dates that include a month and day already. Obviously, you have to change the year, the replacement date, and the event type based on the particular census and it's enumeration date. Does this help?

Joyce, Second Site will attempt to read a caption from the image file if there is no caption defined in TMG. Second Site supports IPTC headers. I looked at the FotoTagger site. Second Site does not support FotoTagger's FotoML format for image mapping/annotation. As far as I can tell, even though FotoML is an open standard, the only tool to support it is FotoTagger. Some websites (flickr, blogger) support FotoML, but I believe they do so using a PHP library supplied by FotoTagger/Cogitum that would be difficult to integrate with Second Site. You can make image maps for images used in Second Site with the Exhibit Image Map feature in TMG Utility. This is similar to FotoTagger's annotations, but the text is not visible until/unless you position the mouse over a specific area of the image. I'll consider adding support for FotoTagger, but in the spirit of full-disclosure, it's not a high priority for me right now.

FYI. If an exhibit is attached to an event, Second Site will include a link to the exhibit for all the principals and witnesses. You can also use image maps, where each person in the photograph is a link to his or her entry in the site.

Like Terry, I often use an additional Name-Var tag for people like Kenneth Neil Lambert who was known as Neil. In most cases, I make the "Neil Lambert" name tag the primary name tag, and I add a custom Name-Full tag whose sentence is something like "His full birth name was [N]" or something similar to that.

I leave the name subfields blank if I don't know them. If you don't like how that looks when one of those names appears as "(--- ? ----)" or whatever in a particular sentence, I'd adjust the sentence.

Neil, I suspect that you tried to export your TMG data to Excel, in which case you'd get a lot of files, one for each of the tables in a TMG Project database. What you should try instead is to send a List of Events report to a CVS/Excel file. Using the List of Events report will limit the output to a single file. Include the person's name, event date, and place as columns in the report. Then try to import that into MapPoint. You might have to put the place in column 1, it depends on what the MapPoint import wizard allows/expects. I am not sure what MapPoint will do with the person's name and the event date, but it will be interesting to find out! I'm intriqued by MapPoint, but not enough to shell out $300 to buy it.

Mappoint is the technology behind Microsoft's online mapping servce Live Local. Are you referring to Live Local, or to the desktop program? If you are referring to the online tool, there are a couple ways to use that terchnology. You can use TMG's "Place Mapping" feature to locate places using a variety of mapping services, including Live Local. I don't think Live Local is included in the default services, but you can customize the place mapping feature to include it. In the next version of TMG Utility, which I expect to release later this month, you can export your master place list. You can export to HTML format, and include links from each place to either Google or Live Local. The accuracy of the maps will depend on a number of factors, including how you entered the data, how detailed the map information is for the given area, etc. I am not sure how you could use the desktop version of MapPoint, mostly because I don't know anything about that product. If you can import a list of places, then I bet we can arrange for TMG Utility to export a suitable data file. If you can point (deliberate pun) me to online import specs for MapPoint, I'll take a look and see if I can modify the place export feature to support it.

Right. OTD can filter the calendar by a TMG flag value, so create a custom flag in TMG, set the value of the flag using a TMG "List of People" report that only includes the people you want in the calendar, and then tell OTD to use the flag. That approach is much better than creating a susbset database.

You should take a look at my "On This Day" (OTD) program which can create an HTML calendar from your TMG data. Given that you want to add photos and you probably want to dress it up a little, you could edit the calendar OTD produced. It will save you the manual effort of creating BMDB dates, etc. If you intend to print the calendar, you could import the HTML pages into MS Word or some other word processor and modify them there. See On This Day

Sharon, Take a look at the "Export Data" function in TMG Utility. It includes an option to export source data. It creates an XML file, but also includes an option to convert the XML into an HTML page. There is a short example you can review before you do anything else.

I don't think you can do it. if you have the picklist set to display primary names, then it isn't going to show the "Alice" non-primary name. If you have it set to display all names, then "Alice" will show, but so will the primary name. Why not make "ALice" the primary name?

Ralph, There is no easy way to do that within TMG, but the "Capitalize Names" feature of TMG Utility will do 99% of the job for you, if not 100%. See: Capitalize Names

I don't think you can get what you want. If the exhibit is attached to a source, then the exhibit, or a link to it, will appear on the source page. If you opt not to show the source page, then the source exhibits will not show, either. If you do show the source page, then the user can access the exhibit by clicking the source number in the citation; the source number is a link to the source page entry. If you want the exhibit to be a link on the citation, then it has to be a citation exhibit. In that case, you'll have to add the exhibit to all the citations where you want it to appear.

Source exhibits don't show at the end of citations. They show at the end of the source page entry. Citation exhibits are shown on citations.

Toa, TMG has the ability to print most reports in HTML format, and many people have built web sites using TMG's Journal reports or one of the other report formats. TMG users can also export their data to GEDCOM and use one of the GEDCOM-to-HTML site builders. There is a third option, too, and that is to use a companion product named "Second Site". Second Site is tightly integrated with TMG in that Second Site reads the TMG data directly to make a site. Second Site supports most of TMG features including narratives, witnesses, exhibits, and much more. You can control the look of the site, as well as many other characteristics of the site, using one of the hundreds of options available. You can read about Second Site on the Second Site homepage. You may want to look at some example sites to see what can be done. Another resource is a list of sites made by TMG users. Many use Second Site, but there are sites made other ways listed there, too. See: http://www.whollygenes.com/forums201/index.php?showforum=50 I am the author of Second Site, and clearly biased. I suspect some other TMG users will comment on this topic and that will give you some less biased responses!

Why do you want to do that? There is no guarantee that the DNA for the people entered as descendents have the same DNA. Clearly, many will, but mixed in there will be mutations and non-paternity/non-maternity. You've already entered data that says x was the parent of y, so why clone the DNA (deliberate pun!) to the descendants?

See my comments below about SS. I think most TMG users have a mix of detailed sources and general sources. The division between "lumpers" (people who use very general sources) and "splitters" (people who use very specific sources) is evident for certain common sources like census records. Some people use very specific sources, others use more general sources. I don't think there is a right answer. You may want to solicit input on this topic on the TMG mailing list. Let the advocates of each approach make their cases, and see how that influences your opinion. I think SS can do most of what you want, but probably not everything you want. By default, SS produces a surname index and a name index. The surname index points into the name index. There is no family index, and there is no pictures/exhibits index. I am not sure exactly what you mean by a "family" index, but if you wanted an index of only the people who are descended from some common ancestor, you can ask SS to make a "custom index" for those people. Basically, you set a custom flag in TMG and tell SS to make a name index that contains only the people who have a certain value in the custom flag field. SS will make various kinds of charts, including descendant and pedigree (ancestor) charts. The names in the chart are links to the "bullet" entries (called "person entries" or "person page entries" in SS lingo) unless the person does not appear in the site. (You can make charts that include anyone in your TMG project even if the person was not selected to be included in the site.) I am not sure I understand your comment about "biography/sketch/obituary/other narrative access via link" but I will say that SS is very flexible with regards to exhibits. If you have an obituary stored as an exhibit, for example, you can have a link to that exhibit in the person entry. Other than that, all I can say is that the options for how you handle biography/sketch/obituary depends on how you have those items stored in TMG.

I presume you are referring to Second Site when you say, "I know that there is a web page creator available for TMG data, but it tends to be largely narrative-based." It is true that many people use Second Site to create narrative-based sites. You can create non-narrative sites, however. Here's an example of the Bullets format. I am not sure what you find confusing about citations. Citations link a piece of evidence, such as a birth date or place, to a source record. The source record describes the source information that applies to all the citations. So, for example, if you were citing data from a compiled genealogy published in book form, you would add a source record for the book, and it would have the title and author of the book, the publisher and year oif publication, etc. At that point, that source record wouldn't support any particular piece of evidence in your TMG project. Next, you'd add a citation. Let's assume you found a birth place in the book. You'd open the birth tag (or create a new one), and add a citation. The source number for the citation refers to the source record you created for the book. In the citation details, you'd probably put the page number on which the birth place appeared. When TMG produces a report, it will combine information from the source record and the citation record to make a footnote or an endnote, based on options you set in the report definition. Hope this helps.

Al, Second Site is saying that it can't find the CDX (index) file for the "i" (ALFIELDi.cdx) table. "i" is where exhibits are stored. TMG says it can't find one table, and my guess, like yours, is that the TMG and SS problems are related, and so the "i" table is probably what is giving TMG difficulties. I have no clue why an import of a TMG v4 dataset into a TMG v6 project would fail. The name of the file is a little odd; TMG has an underscore as part of the file names, i.e., "ALFIELD_i.cdx". I suggest you talk to Customer Support via support@whollygenes.com.

TMG Utility (see link below) has a facility to copy sentences from one project to another. Basically, you Export Sentences from one dataset, and Import Sentences into another.

Kevin, I'll throw my 2 cents in. In general, the date field for TMG event tags is almost always used to record the date of the event being recorded. There may be special circumstances, such as recording information that isn't associated with a dated event, or recording information where the date is unknown. In those cases, you can leave the date blank or there may be other useful ways of using the date field. The date for an SSN should probably be the date the SSN was acquired, if known. When I have a copy of an SSN application, I record the application date and use some of the other event fields to record information from the SSN app. Although the SSN is valid from that point until the person dies, the acquisition of the SSN seems like the single date of importance for that event. I don't think that's absolutely the right answer, it's just the way I think of it. There is an interesting similarity between the Marriage tag and the SSN tag. We call it a "Marriage" date, but it's actually the wedding date. Using terminology from my SSN argument above, we record the date the marriage partner was acquired! If we were actually recording a Marriage date, it would have to be a range.