Person Exclusion

[mikefox@satx.rr.com 0]

As a prerequisite for getting her family line, a cousin has required that no individual after her great-grandfather & mother ever appear in any report or public forum such as the internet (including Second Site). I've looked at 'excluding data and information' including the double exclusion marker, "--" (two hyphens), and it's still not clear to me how to make a person/s vanish from descendancy and other reports. Could someone give me a bit of help on where this info is in clear text?

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Mike,

 

In TMG there is a difference between excluding a single piece of data and excluding a person. The "Exclude Information" topic describes the controls that can be used to exclude the data in a single field from being output. This feature is not intended to control whether all of the information about an individual is output.

 

There are many ways to accomplish your goal, but the one I use is to create a custom FLAG. The value for a flag is associated with the entire person. Thus in your case you could set a custom flag value to indicate whether a person should be included in any report, and then filter the people included in reports based on that flag value. How you filter a report depends upon the specific report. In the most extreme case you could simply use the flag to filter a List of People report to temporarily create a separate project of only the desired people using the Secondary Output option tab, and then run your reports from that temporary project.

 

Terry has a web page describing the basics of Flags here which should get you started.

 

Hope this gives you ideas. If you need more details, just ask.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Michael has suggested use of a Flag to control who will be included in output. But be aware that ancestor and descendant charts and reports cannot exclude people based on a flag - as Michael has intimated, you would have to use the Flag to create a temporary project or data set to achieve that. Box charts are an exception - a Flag can be used directly in that case. So are websites created with Second Site - you can use a Flag there to control who is included, but you need to be careful about the settings for "excluded" people if you don't want their names mentioned at all.

 

For TMG's ancestor and descendant reports you might find it easier to make the parent/child relationship tags that connect the last "visible" generation to the first "hidden" one non-primary. When you do that the reports will not follow that line, effectively excluding them from the report. But you would need to be aware of any tags that include both people who are to be included and those who are not - census tags, for example - because they could case the excluded people's names to be mentioned even though the person doesn't appear in the report in his or her own section.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Yep, Terry is better at explaining things, hence his popular book As I hinted at, and Terry gave more detailed examples, each type of report has different issues about using the flag to filter for specific people. As I mentioned, and Terry also suggested, if you don't (or she doesn't) want even the names of these excluded people mentioned then the simplest and easiest method seems to be creating the temporary project that only has the desired people and run the reports from that project. Your main project would have everyone, with their flag set. Then run the List of People report to create the temporary project, run your reports in that project, then delete that project and continue to do data entry in your main project.

[mikefox@satx.rr.com 0]

Good explanation--thanks. Minor problem--Charles and Mary are the last visible generation and Gladys is the first invisible. TMG won't let me toggle the primary link off betweem Charles and Mary and Gladys.

[Mike Talbot 0]

Good explanation--thanks. Minor problem--Charles and Mary are the last visible generation and Gladys is the first invisible. TMG won't let me toggle the primary link off betweem Charles and Mary and Gladys.

 

If there are any parents in a person's record, one and only set must be primary. TMG will allow each person to have as many parents or sets of parents as you choose.

 

For your example, define a DUMMY set of additional parents named something like Charles* and Mary* for Gladys and make them primary. Your Charles and Mary will then automatically be assigned as non-primary by TMG. Do the same for any other problem people.

 

A rub might come if there are many other people already in your database that also fall into the restricted area. Diplomacy is the desired cure for that one.

 

Hope this works out for you,

[Terry Reigel 0]

Good explanation--thanks. Minor problem--Charles and Mary are the last visible generation and Gladys is the first invisible. TMG won't let me toggle the primary link off betweem Charles and Mary and Gladys.

You can't turn off the Primary status from the Parent's screen - you have to go to the Child's screen, select the Father or Mother tag at the top (just under the primary Name tag), and click the [ * ] button or press the * key.

[mikefox@satx.rr.com 0]

That took care of the problem. Thanks for the help!

Mike

[Terry Reigel 0]

You're welcome, Mike.