ricklach

I have been around the block with this question. As a long-time user of TMG, I was disappointed when its developmental life cycle ended. I fretted and fumed for almost a year trying to find a replacement. I already had all the major genealogy programs (Rootsmagic 7, Legacy8, Gramps, Webtrees, Family Historian, etc) and gave them all a trial period to see if I could adjust to their way of doing things. While I found good features in all of them, I just could not come to grips with the underlying data model that was based on the GEDCOM standard in each and every program. After a year of lost research time and disappointment with these replacement programs, I recently had a eureka moment that would solve my dilemma. I knew that TMG could not survive many more Windows upgrades or updates so I decided to take an older laptop (or desktop) and literally "freeze" the technology. I started with a fresh install of Win 7 that I fully updated to the latest updates and then disabled any automatic updates for Windows7. Then I installed TMG 9.05. I added dropbox so that I could download the latest backups should the Win 10 OS stop working with TMG for some reason. I also added Word so that I could see the results of my output in a word processor, for reasons that might become clear in a moment. I prefer working on a desktop so my plan was to continue working with TMG on Win 10 for as long as the program was supported, and when the time came, to switch over to my laptop (or re-purpose one of the many desktop computers that I have). Why did I choose this path? Simply put, TMG is the best genealogy program. Its data model is far superior to all of the other genealogy programs combined and it is a well structured relational database that does not use the gedcom standard for storing data. Consequently, the power and functionality of the TMG database is unparalleled in speed, and flexibility. To make an analogy, TMG was "Watson" while all the others were "Vic20s" and that is why I am staying with TMG until I die. The second reason is the amount of effort that I have invested in my research. My family tree project starts in France about 1570 and includes about 90% of all the descendants of the first progenitor to arrive in North America in 1665. This amounts to tens of thousands of records with copious amounts of data including witnesses, along with stock and custom sentence structures. Only TMG was able to produce the output that I was looking for. Yes, the other programs could mimic TMG's output, but not with the resolution and accuracy that I had so painstakingly developed in TMG. Re-visiting all of the records in any import into any of the other programs was just not an option. I did not fancy redoing 35 years of research just to "make my gedcom" file work in an inferior program. There are many other reasons for staying with TMG, Plainly put, you could combine all of the best features of the other genealogy programs and the resultant program would not hold a candle to TMG - primarily because of their data model. My personal genealogy project is to produce an encyclopedia of each and every person in my ancestral tree, by generation, complete with end-notes and citations, a bibliography, and indexes. I have about 15 generations in the family tree, and just five generations produces a book that is already well over a thousand pages in content. 15 Generations will probably produce tens of thousands of pages. No other program can produce this type of output without massive post editing, in my opinion. From my observations, all other programs crash when I try to produce an encyclopedic sketch from the gedcom data. Hence another reason to stay with TMG. Clearly, my research may not match the aspirations of others in scope, content, or time invested. Given the fact that TMG is no longer available one is only left with the option of choosing one of the newer "gedcom" based genealogy programs. It is just not for me! Perhaps some ambitious soul will acquire the TMG data model and rewrite it so that it will work with the latest operating systems and databases. I am not a fan of cloud-based anything for security, privacy, and commercial reasons (you do all the work and someone else reaps a profit from your time and effort). I just will not go there!

TMG does a pretty reasonable job of producing a variety individual reports. However, a considerable amount of editing time is required within each tag for an individual to produce a report to be proud of. When reports are combined for a family report there is again some editing required. The Book Manager does not solve the problem. What is need is a fully functional editor that can take all the raw output from a report and opens it in a feature-rich text editor that will allow the user to develop their own writing style without loosing the the content provided by the various variables that are inherent in each report. That way, a change to a date (name, role, etc) would be reflected in the new edited report without having to re-edit individual reports. I have tried many different approaches to producing a Book within TMG. All of them were less than ideal but what the various reports did was help establish a pattern and fill in the necessary details so that I could edit the output. One approach that I have tried is to output the reports to a word processor, edit the individual reports and then save them to be reused later. Unfortunately they cannot be saved in TMG for output later (while maintaining the styles codes used by wordprocessors) so this approach defeats the idea of any new factual changes within TMG being automatically reflected in the saved reports. The other approach I have tried is to save the reports as RTF liles and then import them into FTM using the same data as that from TMG but this approach has proved to be both time consuming and illogical just to get the benefits of a good word processor/editing capability. TMG has the "power" while FTM has discovered the "process". Databases were designed to write once use many times and in this respect the fusion of two technologies has not taken place and so we have to endure endless cycles of report generation and editing to reach and maintain consistent prose. I have close to 100K people in my database and I would like to get started on my series of books. Any of the process I have tried thus far are not options. At this stage I am looking for some ideas that I have not already tried to assist me in this project. Any takers!

I can't seem to get the USGS working with firefox anymore. It works with the Canadian database and with maps. I have tried the IE7 fix but that does not work. Can anyone help here?

As I noted I am aware of that info and because it works with other databases one could assume that the settings are correct (as they are). It is just the USGS that it does not launch a browser. Now this is not a big problem since I leave the USGS running because it does not accept search terms and just cut and paste between them - it is the fastest method. However, a cursory view of the USGS search page shows that it will accept search terms - the problem is figuring out what terms to include and how to solve the session problem. Rick

Is there an easy way to search all fields in any tag for a single bit of information? I tried several searches but they never returned the record I was looking for. For example, I want to search for a street name in any tag - can I do this?

Thanks, worked like a charm.