John Cardinal

Don, My advice is to focus on a single exhibit that is not working the way you expect. Focusing on a single image allows you to inspect the details and make changes without spending a lot of time. Keep track of what you did so that when you discover the problem/solution, you'll know what has to be done for the other exhibits. Make sure that the path stored in the TMG exhibit record is correct. That assumes that you can access the external exhibit image file from Windows. If the path is not correct, but the image file is visible in a Windows folder, then re-load the image file. If the image file is not visible in a Windows folder, then you have to correct that issue: you could copy exhibit files to the Windows side, or perhaps add a network share so that Windows can access Mac files.

I am pleased to announce Second Site 6! Second Site Version 6 is a major new release with new features and other enhancements. The major focus of this release was to make sites mobile-friendly. According to usage statistics, more people are using the Internet via smartphones and tablets than on desktop or laptop computers, so it's important for sites to be as accommodating as possible to visitors using mobile devices. For a description of all the new features, see Second Site News #069 This is the first non-free upgrade since April of 2013, almost three years ago. I hope all current users will upgrade soon. The upgrade price for Second Site 5 customers is $14.95 USD. New customers and customers whose most-recent license is for Second Site 4 or previous must purchase the full-price license for Second Site 6 for $34.95 USD. There is no difference between the installer programs for the full version license and the upgrade license. The difference is the cost of the license. Customers who purchased the full version of Second Site 5 on or after December 1, 2015 qualify for a free license for Second Site 6. That license has already been sent via email. Contact me if you think you qualify but you have not received your Second Site 6 license information. To purchase a license for Second Site, start on the Second Site home page.

Second Site Version 6.2.6 is now available. This is a maintenance release with no new features but (including v6.2.5) includes some significant fixes. I recommend that all Second Site users upgrade to this release. This is a free upgrade for registered users of Second Site 6. If you are using Second Site 5 or a previous version, you must purchase a license to use Second Site 6. The release announcement is in the latest issue of Second Site News. The changes are summarized in the Change Log. Current Second Site 6 users can download the installer here.

Donald, Yes, that appears to be the correct installer for TMG v9.05. Based on the error message, it appears that the TMG installer is having trouble writing its log file, and that may indicate general problems with accessing the parts of the Windows file system that the installer uses. Does your Windows-under-Parallels have a disk with plenty of space on it? Is Parallels configured to share the home folder of the Mac-side user with the Windows-side user? If so, while that can be made to work, I think it makes things much more difficult and I don't recommend it. I haven't used Parallels in a while and I forget where the option is to turn that off and keep the My Documents folder (and other folders) under Windows exclusive control. I am not confident that is an issue here, but it could be.

Don, Have you rebooted Windows since the problem occurred? If not, then reboot Windows and try to install TMG again.

Ann, I have seen cases where a person is attached to an event with an invalid role assignment, and what you described makes me think that is what is happening in your case. If VFI doesn't solve the problem, contact me and I'll help you figure out a fix.

John, I didn't have to do any folder fiddling when using Parallels, TMG, and SS. The secret was not to use the Parallels option where the OS X "home" folder is also used as the Windows "My Documents" folder. I forget the exact details, and I no longer have access to Parallels to refresh my memory. By avoding that Parallels option, I avoided using network paths in Windows to get to the My Documents folder, and that avoided a bunch of issues other people ran into.

John, You should not have to wrestle with Second Site to get it working under Parallels. Most of Second Site was developed while I used Windows under Parallels on a MacBook Pro. What exactly are you wrestling with?

wdwilson, You should send a request to support@whollygenes.com. There's no reason to wait to hear Gordon's outcome. That will only introduce a delay getting yours.

Jim, I stand corrected. However, I recall someone had trouble with a direct import of a TMG v8-something project into RM. The response was that the import was designed for TMG v9, and RM was treating the TMG v8 data as if it was TMG v9. I looked for that message, but couldn't find it, so maybe I am not remembering correctly.

Ketil, If you would like to keep using TMG, you can still purchase a license for TMG v9.05. You can contact Harry Goegebeur, a TMG dealer in Belgium. He's the only person still selling licenses, and only until he runs out. His email address is Harry.Goegebeur@telenet.be. If you want to transfer your data to another program, you should proceed carefully. If you import a GEDCOM file into Legacy, you may not be happy with the results, and make a lot of work for yourself cleaning up after the transfer. In most cases, even a "good" transfer from one program to another will leave you with some cleanup work to do. Two programs have "direct import" from a TMG project: RootsMagic and Family Historian. Neither one captures all the data, but the direct imports do a better job than any GEDCOM transfer will do. One rub is that both programs will only do a direct import from a TMG v9.05 project. So, if you aren't interested in continuing to use TMG, you might want someone with TMG v9.05 to convert your v7.04 data to a v9.05 project and then use the direct import feature of either RootsMagic or Family Historian. I'm busy with other matters right now, so I can't do the conversion for you. Let me know what you decide, however, and I will try to hook you up with someone who will.

Nancy, Jim will know better than me why you got the error message. I think it can happen when the SQZ file you are restoring is on a read-only volume. For best results, copy the SQZ file to the hard drive of the PC where you will restore it. Don't access it over the network or from a thumbdrive. (The thumbdrive may not be read only, but it may not have any available space on it, and TMG will use space on the same volume as the SQZ file is located.) TMG backup files have the extension ".SQZ", so NZLibry.SQZ, NZMultim.SQZ and NZProj.SQZ are probably TMG backups. Do the names indicate anything to you, i.e., can you guess which is more likely to be your main TMG project? Maybe they are all from your main TMG project? You should probably restore all three and look at the contents to determine what is what.

deckie49, FTST has not been updated in years. If I recall correctly, it was essentially a version of TMG 5 that did not allow editing the project data. While you may not need the features of TMG that are not in FTST, you might be better served by getting TMG 9. You'll avoid bugs that were present in TMG 5, you'll have access to all the features added between TMG v5 and TMG v9, and you'll have a product that is better-suited to running on modern versions of MS Windows. There are still some license available for TMG v9, but they won't last. You can get one from Harry Goegebeur, a Belgium dealer, at Harry.Goegebeur@telenet.be.

TMG has an internal record number that is unique to each exhibit record. TMG Utility exports that as the first column and calls it "ID". It would be useful to someone who wanted to update the TMG database based on editing the XML data. Everyone else can safely ignore it.

Leonard, I recommend that you purchase TMG v9.05, the latest version, while there are still licenses available. You can contact Harry Goegebeur, a Belgium dealer, at Harry.Goegebeur@telenet.be.

You can also use the Export Data > Places feature in TMG Utility.

Roger, You can use HTML entity codes for the characters, but its clearly not an easy pill to swallow. It makes things difficult in TMG because you enter and see (for example) "ā" not the expected ā character, so "Māori", not "Māori". In TMG report output, you'd probably use macros to convert the HTML entity codes to the actual characters. SS output should work without any changes.

In TMG, there are two values that mean living: ? and Y. There is one value that means deceased, N. When creating a filter to select living people, I suggest that you use the filter: Living does not equal N If there are people in the result set that you think are not living, check their flag value. It will probably be Y or ? when it should be N. To check for people who have Living=? but perhaps should be Living=N, you should review the Set Living=N feature in my TMG Utility program.

Carl, I am not aware of a way to mass delete sources that have no citations. There might be a tricky way to do it where you copy everyone in the project to a new project using the "List of People" secondary output capability. When TMG builds a new project like that, I think it only copies the sources that are actually used. In the Master Source List, you can delete a single source pretty quickly, so the other choice is to bite the bullet and click 1,200 times (once to request deletion, once to confirm it, for 600 sources) to get rid of them.

Carl, The Change CItation Parts feature in TMG Utility may be able to help. You can use it to merge sources by changing the Source Number associated with a source. if you can write a filter that reliably chooses all citations that should be for Source "X", but are currently assigned to some other source, then you change the Source Number to "X".

Jim, Were the damaged headers something Visual FoxPro fixes? If not, what did you use to fix them? Thanks.

Ron, What version of TMG are you using?

You could try this: add the period to the sentence yourself and then use TMG's [:NP:] code in the sentence to prevent TMG from adding the sentence-ending punctuation. If you do that, I think TMG will put the citation references after the ending quote. I have not tested this, however, so I may be wrong.

Bob, Add a Descendant Chart User Item. Specify the ID of the starting person as the Subject ID. That's about all there is to it. You can tweak the chart settings from there if you want.

Bob, You have Second Site (SS), right? You wrote earlier that "I want a quick and dirty descendant chart that I can show on my monitor and scroll thru," and SS should do that for you without using JPG and without using print-related technology. An SS chart is made with HTML and the names are text so you can use your browser's "search this page" feature to find people on the chart, and that may be valuable with a large chart. The chart will be integrated with the SS web site, so you can click on the chart entry to go to see that person's details.