rowan.bradley

My copy of TMG 9 (UK) is giving me trouble. Currently the issue that I have is that I have just created a couple of new people, and thereby have created a new marriage. When I double click this marriage, or right click it and select Edit This Tag, a completely different tag opens up that has nothing to do with this marriage:

 

.

 

It is the most recent one that I created, earlier in this editing session.

 

What is going wrong? How do I get back to a state where I can continue data entry and editing?

 

Thanks - Rowan

Sorry, I didn't realise or had forgotten that you had offered to help. Thank you very much. I will now do what you say.

 

Rowan

I now have a working copy of TMG9, but when I try to open my project it tells me that it is a v5 or v6 database, and that I must open it in TMG5 or TMG6, make a backup, then restore it intro TMG9. I don't have a copy of TMG5/6 any more (my computer crashed). Would anyone be able and willing to make this backup for me?

 

Thanks - Rowan

Thanks for this information. I should really have been able to work most of that out for myself.

 

I have now downloaded and installed TMG version 9.

 

It appears that I purchased version 7, and I have found the licence key. Needless to say, it doesn't work in version 9. I have tried opening my project in version 9, and it tells me that it is a version 5/6 project file, and that to open it I have to open it in version 5/6 and export it, them import it into version 9. I don't have version 5, or 6, or 7, because the computer that it was installed on failed. What do I do now?

 

One thing that would I suppose work is for someone who has a working copy of version 5 or 6 to open my project and export it for me. Is anyone prepared to do this?

 

How do I unlock version 9?

 

Thanks for your help - Rowan

It seems that I have to look for another program to manage my genealogy database. What do people recommend?

 

Is there any program which will directly read a TMG database?

 

What program most closely matches TMGs features?

 

What program can import TMG data with minimum data loss or corruption (this is the feature that I need most)?

 

Presumably everyone is grappling with this problem? I would really welcome your advice on recovering from the difficult situation that all TMG users have been left in.

 

Thanks - Rowan

 

The PC I was running TMG on failed. I have moved its hard drive to another computer, and can still copy files from it.

 

I don't know what version of TMG I was running. I know it was a UK version.

 

How do I get a version (preferably the latest version) of TMG running on my new laptop?

 

Can I discover my licence key somehow? Can I discover which version I was running? Can I buy an upgrade? Can I get an installer?

 

I hope someone can help me, otherwise all those years of work risk being wasted...

 

Thanks - Rowan

Interesting info thank you. I understand and agree with the logic for being able to select a different paper size at a late stage. But messing with the default printer is, as you say, a very non-obvious and inelegant solution. Never mind, I now understand how to do this, and it has enabled me to do what I was trying to do. It would just be nice if the software industry (in which I include MS and WG) thought a bit harder about ease of use and the range of uses to which their software may be put, and did a bit more user research, before arbitrarily changing things in new versions...

 

Rowan

Very useful instructions. I managed to make them work using PDFill PDF & Image Writer (Free).

 

But the need for this complicated procedure is presumably because Visual Chartform is missing some features that it ought to have? In particular, it seems to have a Custom Size option in chart size, but no way of specifying what the custom size is...

 

Rowan

Once you've installed the driver, it should work.

It does. This is a very useful utility. However, it's still going to take some considerable amount of time to puzzle out how all the tables are used, what the fields mean, how the data is encoded, which foreign keys are referred to etc., even with the help of the v3.6 file structure document and the Wikipedia article referred to earlier in this thread.

 

By the way, does TMG have any concrete plans for migrating to a non Foxpro database?

 

Thanks - Rowan

You can export the data tables to other formats. File / Export

 

A very old database description is available here...

http://www.whollygen...p?showtopic=381

 

You can export the data tables to other formats. File / Export

Thanks for your reply. I've just tried exporting to Excel. What it did was to create 27 individual XLS files, each of which appeared to contain a single database table. In order to make use of this data, I will need to know what each column in each table means, how the data is encoded (where it's not obvious, e.g. with dates), and how the data in the various tables is connected together (e.g. info about "foreign keys").

 

A very old database description is available here

It's not going to be much good having a database schema for version 3.6 in 1998, if any reasonable amount of development has gone on between then and now (which it surely must have done, to go through 5 major version numbers and countless minor upgrades). Surely they must make the schema avaialble? How do people like John Cardinal who write extensions to TMG manage?

 

Thanks - Rowan

Is there a way of accessing the TMG database directly? Obviously to do this I would need to thoroughly understand the schema of the database - is this documented somewhere?

 

The reason I'm asking is that I' ve discovered a rather interesting web based way of displaying genealogy data, and the guy who wrote this has given me a copy of his code. I would like to try it with my genealogy data, but it's in TMG. For this tool it needs to be in some tables in MySQL, and the design of the tables will of course be different from those of TMG, so I need to produce a translation tool, or an export and import tool. I know I could export all the data into GEDCOM and then write a GEDCOM import tool for the display system, but (a) going from a relational database to an idiosynchratic text based format and then back to a relational database seems like hard work, and ( I don't want to lose any data that might be in TMG but is not in the GEDCOM export file.

 

Thanks - Rowan

What would be nice is a crippled "read only" version of TMG that I could send them and then let them make all the corrections they want in a text file (preferably stories, anecdotes, etc and critical date corrections). Then I could make the corrections myself.

Why not create a web site from your TMG database using John Cardinal's Second Site, and let your relations comment on that? To create a simple web site embodying all your data (sources and all) is only a few clicks...

 

Rowan

find the parent/child relationship tag that connects the person you want to exclude to the rest of the family and temporarily make it non-primary.

Thanks Terry and all others for all these helpful suggestions. I'm learning lots of useful stuff.

 

Making a parent/child relationship non-primary and later reverting it to primary does not risk losing any information at all - citations, memos or anything? My database will be exactly the same afterwards as it was before?

 

What is the non-primary feature actually designed to be used for? Another thing I've never penetrated until now!

 

Thanks - Rowan

Excluding a single child from a descendant line is not the sort of operation that you would normally do or at least not frequently.

Let me explain why I want to do this. I have recently discovered a lot of information about the ancestry of my great grandmother. I would like to contact all my great grandmother's living descendants of age greater than 16 (for example), and maybe also excluding those I know to be senile, to ask them whether they would like to see this new information. Before I do this I want to ask my uncle (the last surviving member of the family of my mother's generation) for his memories, and whether he knows how to contact all these second cousins and related people. I therefore want to create some kind of narrative report showing all I know about my great grandmother and all her descendants, but in order to keep the document manageable and to avoid confusing an 85 year old uncle I want to exclude all those who are children or senile, and I also want to exclude the descendants of my grandfather (i.e. my uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters and first cousins, and all their spouses, children and grandchildren), all of whom I know and am in contact with.

 

I would have thought that it was not that rare to want to do some such thing, and that with a good family history program it should be dead easy - certainly easier than hand crafting the document which is what I'm currently trying to do.

 

Thanks - Rowan

Is it thought a good idea to use TMG to record the addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of people who I have corresponded with about family history matters? Or is it better to use a completely different system for this (e.g. Microsoft Outlook or your favourite e-mail program)? Many (but of course by no means all) of the people I have corresponded with are in my family tree so it would avoid duplication to use TMG to hold their current contact details. I suppose it would need a synchronisation facility to allow these addresses to be used by my e-mail program, but these are common these days, so should not be too much of a problem. It might also be useful to maintain (as GenesReunited does) a link between the correspondent and the person in my tree who they are corresponding about - then at a future date I could ask "show me a list of all the people I have corresponded with about person X and his descendants".

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Thanks - Rowan

Thanks for your reply. This sounds a rather tedious and risky (in case you don't restore the relationship exactly the way it was) way of doing something that ought to be pretty simple. I would have thought there could/should be a way of displaying people in some kind of list or report, maybe with selection checkboxes, selecting everyone in a branch of the family tree (e.g. A and all his descendants) and then deselecting some of them (by control-clicking them, dragging a box around them, a context menu or similar), and then producing a report using only selected people.

 

I started trying to do it by creating a custom flag, and then going through the descendants of A that I wanted to include in the report and setting the flag to Y, but even this is pretty tedious. It takes several mouse clicks per person to set the flag, so if there are a lot of people it takes a long time.

 

If anyone has any better ideas I'd love to hear them!

 

Thanks - Rowan

Can someone suggest the best/easiest way of producibng a report containing (for example) all of the descendants of person A, apart from descendants of A's son B?

 

Thanks = Rowan

Despite having used TMG for some time, I’m only now really trying to get to grips with TMG’s system for recording citations, sources and repositories, and set up my own standards for doing this throughout my database.

 

If (this is a real recent example) I’ve got the county record office that holds the original parish register of the church where my ancestor was married to send me a photocopy of the relevant page, and now I want to scan this and make it available in my database, what’s the right way to do this?

 

Is the source the original register, the photocopy, or the scan? Or all three?

 

Is the repository the County Record Office (where the original register is), or my filing cabinet (where the photocopy is), or a directory on my disk drive (where the scan is)?

 

Can I record the scan as an Exhibit? If so, what is the exhibit attached to? It does not seem possible to attach an exhibit to a citation. If the source is the whole of the parish register, then I might have 100 scans of different pages of it. If I make these exhibits attached to the source, then each citation will have 100 exhibits, and it won’t be clear which of them is relevant to this citation. It would, it seems to me, be most appropriate in this situation to have the exhibit attached to the citation, so only the relevant page comes up when a user is looking at the citation.

 

If, on the other hand, the source is this individual page of the register, then I can have the relevant exhibit attached to it, but I will need to create 100 different sources, each with a lot of duplicated information.

 

I hope someone can provide some advice! By the way, I need my standards configured to suit mostly UK records.

 

Thanks - Rowan

Thanks for your reply.

Read the data File Storage help project to determine where your project should be located.

I've done this. There's a lot to absorb here.

Where was the project that you tried to open located?

The original TMG6 project file was in \\Sue-pc\c\Users\RowanB\Documents\Genealogy\TMG Projects\Sylvester-Bradley__.PJC

 

The SQZ file that I created using TMG6 was in \\Sue-pc\c\Users\RowanB\Documents\Genealogy\TMG Projects\Backup\SYLVESTER-BRADLEY 2010-11-26 18-09-02.sqz

 

The new project created by TMG7 was in the default location, which is C:\Users\Rowan2\Documents\The Master Genealogist v7\Projects\Sylvester-Bradley__.PJC

 

It seems odd that I'm having these problems since (as far as I know) I'm not trying to do anything at all complicated. Surely everyone who upgrades from TMG6 to 7 must have to do exactly what I'm trying to do? It can't be this difficult!

 

Thanks - Rowan

I have just upgraded from v6 to v7. I've backed up my project from v6 to a SQZ file, and restored it into v7. All seemed to go well. I've then made a few changes to my database, closed TMG7, and opened it again. The first thing I notice is that the "open last" button is greyed out. If I choose "Select" and navigate to the PJC file, it tells me that it is a TMG5 or 6 file, and I need to back it up using TMG6. This is _not_ a TMG5/6 file. It was not there before I restored my backup into TMG7. It was created by TMG7. I've now tried this twice, with the same result.

 

What's going on? How do I convert my data so I can work on it in TMG7? As far as I know, I don't want ever to go back to TMG6, so an irreversible conversion would be fine.

 

Thanks - Rowan

I've just upgraded from TMG6 to TMG7. As requested I have backed up my TMG6 project to a SQZ file and am trying to restore it into TMG7. It tells me that I'm overwriting a number of DNA, BKP, TXT, INI and other files (I got bored of pressing the Yes button and eventually clicked Yes to All). Does this matter? What am I overwriting? Presumably it's overwriting some files that came with TMG7 with something from my old project. Is this what I want to do? As far as I know, I've never used DNA files.

 

Thanks - Rowan

There used to be a version of Pocket Genealogist that was free and that would view TMG files, but not allow you to modify them. I used to have this on my PDA, and it was very useful if I forgot some wrinkle of the family tree when away from my computer. Now I have replaced my PDA and I can't find it. I don't seem able to find it on the WhollyGenes or the Northern Hills sites either. Does this free or demo mode still exist? Where can I download this without paying for the full version?

 

Thanks - Rowan