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Nick Shelley

TMG documents to donate - it shouldn't be this hard

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Whilst I was accumulating all sorts of fascinating family material, I thought that to pass on my research, all I had to do was print it out using one of the multi-generational reports like the Descendant Indented Narrative or the Journal Report. I thought the choice of which to use was a matter of style, but it isn't, it is also a matter of substance.

 

When I eventually came to look into this more seriously I realised that there was a real problem with this approach. With increasing numbers of generations, the reports become unwieldy; it becomes harder to mentally keep in touch with which part of the tree you are in until in the end the report becomes too heavy to read.

 

I had also not realised the difference between the two main types of report: individual and descendant narrative reports exclude the birth of an individual's children so that their narrative is stripped of this genealogically and socially central explanation of their lives. The Journal report suffers from the same attitude to children but tries to compensate for this by adding the children at the end of the parents' narrative as if one were counting the number of cars they had owned over their lifetime. I recognise that Wholly Genes think long and hard about their choices so I know that there will be good rationales for treating children as historical appendages, but I don't find this approach helpful.

 

Giving up on large and unwieldy generational reports, I decided to create an 'encyclopaedia' of names arranged in alphabetical order. I chose to use the Journal report, set to one generation depth, because it does at least include the names and details about an individual's children and because it adds some of the details of the wife's life.

 

Over many days I constructed a series of surname filters that gradually encompassed all those that I had researched. Microsoft Word dictates the size of the file that it will open in its name and this means that I could not create one filter per letter of the alphabet which would have looked nice. In the end 33 Journal reports were needed.

 

My huge sense of relief lasted up to the moment when I came to analyse how many pages I would have to print and in the process also checked on the number of people involved. I have two versions of the encyclopaedia, one private because they include people still living; the other public which includes only those who have already died. Even the public version came to over 8,000 pages, whilst the private one was over 10,000 pages. How one's research quietly builds up!

 

I set the report conditions so that only BMD details would be shown for parents' children; the fuller details of their lives could then be expressed on their own pages. Problems about which people are or are not 'carried forward' to the next generation would not arise as each person's narrative is created by a 1-generation report - no one is carried forward. Thus aunt Coreen Crawford who remained unmarried throughout her life would be briefly mentioned as a child of her parents whilst the fuller details of her life would be shown on her own page. The same for her mother, the only difference being that she had been married. Except this isn't what happened.

 

Maiden aunt Coreen does appear as the child of her parents Andrew and Gertrude but the filter ("surname comes after Ci and before Cz") does not seem to find her and so she does not have an entry in her own name. Her mother who did marry IS found, as expected, under her maiden name. However my equally married wife does NOT appear under her maiden name. Coreen's brother who did marry but had no children does appear. But another relative, an uncle who did not marry, does not appear. Whatever the rules being played out here, all the people missing CAN have their Journal reports created manually using the same journal conditions except for the filter.

 

The filter states, in the example of my missing wife: 1. TYPE is not A (ie: P is not an archival item) AND 2. TYPE is not E (ie: P is not a census result) AND 3. Surname comes after Wd AND 4. Surname comes before WJ. There is no mention of gender or marital status.

 

I do know that there is a 'way around this' and that is choose the report settings so that all the details of a child's life are given if they do not marry. But there are reasons why I don't find this entirely satisfactory: 1) someone looking for a person's name alphabetically simply will not find them; 2) it can break-up the clarity of the parent's narrative if brief BMDs are given for the married children whilst non-married children can have several pages of their own; and 3) whilst they can be found if an index is generated (as a child to the parent), frankly I would like to be able to generate an independent entry for each person regardless of their marital and gender status.

 

My concerns are threefold:

1. without luck, I would never have known that people were going missing

2. although there will be good reasons for these findings, I don't know what they are and I guess others may not either

3. creating an encyclopaedia or list of each person researched should not be this hard. Just as much as I want to know what settings I need so that people are not missed out, I would like to see Wholly Genes prepare a worked example so that others can successfully pass on all that they know confident that there are no programming quirks which would undermine this intention.

 

Nick Shelley

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When I eventually came to look into this more seriously I realised that there was a real problem with this approach. With increasing numbers of generations, the reports become unwieldy; it becomes harder to mentally keep in touch with which part of the tree you are in until in the end the report becomes too heavy to read.

Yes, a descendants or ancestors report can get too long to make a lot of sense. Authors of books on family history typically divide the family into sections, with each in a chapter. Think that helps. I've not tried to do that with TMG reports, so don't know what kind of issues would appear.

 

I had also not realised the difference between the two main types of report: individual and descendant narrative reports exclude the birth of an individual's children so that their narrative is stripped of this genealogically and socially central explanation of their lives.

That issue has been discussed many times on TMG-L, and maybe here. I think they don't appear in the descendant narrative reports because they appear below, as they do in a Journal, but in a different format. The Individual Narrative is just a single-person descendant narrative report, so they don't appear there either. There have been requests from time to time to have a feature that adds the birth of children to these types of reports. I think one issue is that TMG creates all narrative reports from tag sentences, and there is at least currently no place for a Sentence for this purpose. The generally recommended solution for those who want the births reported in the body of the parent's narrative is to make the parents witnesses in the child's birth tag and create a Sentence that produces the output you want.

 

The Journal report suffers from the same attitude to children but tries to compensate for this by adding the children at the end of the parents' narrative as if one were counting the number of cars they had owned over their lifetime. I recognise that Wholly Genes think long and hard about their choices so I know that there will be good rationales for treating children as historical appendages, but I don't find this approach helpful.

Actually, this is the standard format found in the various society journals on which TMG's Journal is modeled.

 

Maiden aunt Coreen does appear as the child of her parents Andrew and Gertrude but the filter ("surname comes after Ci and before Cz") does not seem to find her and so she does not have an entry in her own name.

She doesn't appear because you cannot create a Descendant's Journal for a person with no children - try it for her individually and you will get an error message. I've asked that this be fixed, but so far it has not been.

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First of all, thanks for your comments, Terry.

 

QUOTE

Maiden aunt Coreen does appear as the child of her parents Andrew and Gertrude but the filter ("surname comes after Ci and before Cz") does not seem to find her and so she does not have an entry in her own name.

 

She doesn't appear because you cannot create a Descendant's Journal for a person with no children - try it for her individually and you will get an error message. I've asked that this be fixed, but so far it has not been.

 

I knew I would trip over somewhere; I obviously ran Journal reports on the married examples!

 

Individually, some of the points I have made could be argued over but when taken together they seem to form a major barrier to passing one's research out. I would like WG to consider this topic seriously. (And it would be really :rolleyes: nice if the indexes across a set of reports could be integrated, perhaps as parts of book 1 ...12 &c).

 

I have attempted to breakdown the descendant reports by generation but I think that these too can become hard to read with more generations.

 

Nick

(I am not sure that I have the hang of using quotes in this forum!)

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First of all, thanks for your comments, Terry.

You're welcome, Nick. :)

 

Individually, some of the points I have made could be argued over but when taken together they seem to form a major barrier to passing one's research out.

I see two major issues that you have raised. The first is mentioning of the birth of children in the body of parent's narratives. TMG has adopted a widely used convention to list the children separately. You prefer to have them embedded in the text. So far as I can see, that's a matter of style and personal preference, and not an obstacle to passing on one's work. It seems to me that most of the family histories I've read list the children separately, as TMG's Journals do. 

 

The other issue is the substantive one of how to arrange 10,000 pages of narrative. That's a huge number of pages! If you could get 500 pages into a book it's still 20 volumes! Clearly to be understandable such a work needs to be broken down into some sort of manageable and logical sections. I don't think a genealogy program can be expected to do that for you by itself. But if you have some suggestions about how TMG could assist in that sort of project I think they would be welcome.

 

I have attempted to breakdown the descendant reports by generation but I think that these too can become hard to read with more generations.

The large family works that I have see done professionally seem to put the first several generations in one volume, then make the members of the last generation the subjects of individual volumes. For example, the "Five Generations" project of the Mayflower Society.

 

(I am not sure that I have the hang of using quotes in this forum!)

It can be tricky, and it's easy to get them mixed up. You have to have the word "quote" in square brackets to start, and "/quote" in square brackets to end the quoted section:

 

[quote]This is quoted text.[/quote]

One way to do that is to highlight the text and click the "Wrap in quote tags" button (the next to last one on the toolbar).

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Nick,

 

It is for that reason that I decided to do one ancestor and come down and only include currently living individuals and put it on a website. With hyperlinks, a person can easily move around the tree, go back to where they were, etc. There's little to no cost in producing the output, I used rootsweb, so I have no cost in putting the tree online and anyone will be able to use the information even after my death, even if they don't live near the library I choose. Since I don't live near a library that would be close to where my ancestors lived, I would have to choose which libraries to use anyway.

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Terry, here are my thoughts on the subject:

 

TMG boasts that its database can hold as many people as you can put in it, or rather, it will not be the limiting factor on the number of people you research and wish to record. Genealogy is an addictive pastime. Many people end up spending several decades doing research. The urge to research is generally far greater than the desire to review one’s progress in a physical output. The longer people research, the more likely they will be surprised by how much information they have accumulated. And by how much extra space the sources (endnotes, bibliography) and the indexes take in each report.

 

The more restricted one’s interest and focus of research, the easier it is to put this into intelligible hard copy by using the reports TMG provides. My situation is this: I have researched most but not all the ancestral names for myself and my wife (and therefore our children). One family tree goes back to the beginning of the 1500’s, a couple to the 1600’s, most to the 1700’s. I have also been interested to see to what extent these families have generated living descendants today over and above our own family. This has been both interesting and useful as some living cousins have been able to throw light on members of our family as well as provide photos of them. In the process of researching up to 13,000 people, I have also accumulated over 8,000 pictures.

 

Researching cousins as well as direct descendants causes the ancestral tree to be much wider at each generation and this makes generational reports more complex to view and to navigate around even when separated into individual generations per file. Clarifying ancestral relationships sometimes requires the research of non-ancestral families; some families have intermarried with our line, sometimes more than once, and one may build up a small cohort of reasonably researched non-ancestral families as well as one’s own.

 

In passing on the totality of one’s research to other researchers in hard copy form, it seems to me that the encyclopeadic format has most to offer. It covers all people researched whether ancestral or accidental; the index will identify all examples of a person’s entry as well as the variations in their name. It can be augmented by relationship charts. I think that it deserves to be a supported output option by WG.

 

Here is an example of how the Encyclopeadic Report has advantages over, for example, the Descendant Indented Narrative Report. After all, this is where I started. I created DIN reports for all the ancestral families that I had done a decent amount of work on. For my family line, this meant 46 separate surnamed Descendant Indented Narrative reports, although perhaps four were a bit thin. For my wife’s line, this added another 23 separate reports. After rather clumsy searching I also identified 40 other families that I had done a significant amount of work on (ie: researching two or more generations). This still left out the other people who only played bit parts in my family’s creation. These reports looked great, in my mind, imagining them spreading across a shelf with the surnames emblazoned across their backs. But then, who would think of looking in the Astbury report for someone with the name Bagguley or in the Willett report for an Esther Buckley? In retrospect, not only were the large reports too heavy to read, they served my needs better than those of another researcher. With a brief sigh at the time taken to generate all these reports (at least electronically), I have given up on this approach. The Encyclopeadic Report seemed to cover all the bases. Now all those Descendant Indented Narratives could be converted to simpler outlines of generational relationships, using either Descendant Indent Charts or VCF charts, which could be used to supplement the Encyclopaedic Report.

 

I still believe that in TMG’s present incarnation the Journal report has the most to offer of the existing reports. Only a small variation of this report would make the encyclopeadic report possible: simply, the ability to create a Journal style report for people with no offspring.

 

If this were achievable then the only other sophistication I would look forward to, within this context, would be to have integrated indexes across the surname ranges. Perhaps these could be created within the Book Manager?

 

My second comment is that I still feel that the above form of the Encyclopeadic Report, depending as it does on either the Individual Narrative or the Journal Report format, is outmoded. I respect the programmers’ decision to maintain consistency with standard genealogy journals. I for one do not provide reports to journals; I have no idea how many TMG users do. But I do find it strange that the genealogical heart of a person’s narrative, their children, is treated in a such a bizarre and psychologically unsatisfactory way. Obviously the presence of children, their gender, health and lives all significantly affect the decisions a family makes during its lifetime; to leave out such events from a person’s narrative is for me deeply unsatisfactory, more so because we are talking about a genealogy program.

Terry, you have said that there is currently no tag sentence for a birth or baptism yet recent TMG updates have created new tags. I would have thought that there could be an option in each birth or baptism tag for the user to select that the event is, or is not, reflected on the parents’ pages as an event. As in the case of the new NarrativeChildren tag, the user could design the most acceptable default sentence. Where there already exists a tag sentence, because the user has already felt it necessary to manually add the parents as witnesses to the event, then the default sentence condition would not be triggered.

 

Thirdly, I know that WG sets a very high store on ensuring that the data in TMG remains secure even when things are not going quite to plan. Understandably users need to feel that their years of work are completely safe in WG’s hands. I am, indeed we all are, getting older and for me the earlier need for data stability is being equalled by the need to be confident that I can pass on these years of work fully and intelligibly. Although Terry has quite rightly identified that people without children don’t get a narrative of their own, there is still the case of my wife who is missing from the Journal report; we have two children, so she should be in the report under her maiden name.

 

Large reports are very time consuming to check even when you are looking for a particular detail; it is a burdensome task that none of us would like to feel that we _need_ to do, although we may choose to do so for our own confirmation. If my wife can be absent when she would seem to pass the criteria for being present I don’t have the confidence I need that my report is safe. This is where I feel WG still has a role to play: it could provide the quality assurance that in a particular report setup, what you intend is what you get. In this way, users wouldn’t have to worry that some quirk of the report creation process isn’t leaving big, or even little holes, in the output.

 

Finally, I understand that others, perhaps also feeling that the printed output of their work does not have an outlet entirely to their satisfaction, have turned to electronic alternatives. John Cardinal’s Second Site is a really excellent interpretation of TMG data and produces a good looking and flexible result. But there is still a part of me that is wedded to hard copy as an extra security against the future change. All original sources are based in hard copy even if some of them have been now been digitised. Without a doubt, there are problems with hard copy (the quality of the paper, the ink and the cost for a start). But I still want the option in TMG and the present options are good but not yet good enough, for me; but they could be. The Encyclopaedic Report would benefit and interest all users not just those with large databases.

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Nick,

 

I think you raise several good points.

 

 

Researching cousins as well as direct descendants causes the ancestral tree to be much wider at each generation and this makes generational reports more complex to view and to navigate around even when separated into individual generations per file. Clarifying ancestral relationships sometimes requires the research of non-ancestral families; some families have intermarried with our line, sometimes more than once, and one may build up a small cohort of reasonably researched non-ancestral families as well as one's own.

Yes, I understand. I have a similar accumulation and despair of outputting them on paper. 

 

In passing on the totality of one's research to other researchers in hard copy form, it seems to me that the encyclopeadic format has most to offer. It covers all people researched whether ancestral or accidental; the index will identify all examples of a person's entry as well as the variations in their name. It can be augmented by relationship charts. I think that it deserves to be a supported output option by WG.

I think that approach has a lot of merit.

 

I still believe that in TMG's present incarnation the Journal report has the most to offer of the existing reports. Only a small variation of this report would make the encyclopeadic report possible: simply, the ability to create a Journal style report for people with no offspring.

I agree. And I've verified your finding that you do get the report if there is a marriage tag, but not if there is not. That makes no sense to me, and I've renewed my request that it be fixed.

 

If this were achievable then the only other sophistication I would look forward to, within this context, would be to have integrated indexes across the surname ranges. Perhaps these could be created within the Book Manager?

This doesn't look like a simple matter to address to me. Today TMG only produces indexes when the output is to a word processor. It does that by embedding the word-processor's index codes in the file, and the actual index itself is produced by the word processor. For that to work I believe the entire work has to be in a single word processor document (Word's Master document feature may provide a solution, but I hear that it doesn't work well). But as I think you have pointed out, Word cannot open a single file of the size needed for your needs.

 

My second comment is that I still feel that the above form of the Encyclopeadic Report, depending as it does on either the Individual Narrative or the Journal Report format, is outmoded. I respect the programmers' decision to maintain consistency with standard genealogy journals. I for one do not provide reports to journals; I have no idea how many TMG users do.
 

I would only comment that the "journal" format, or variations of it, are commonly used by TMG and other genealogy programs, not because users submit their work to Journals, but because they are found my many to be clear and understandable. :)

 

But I do find it strange that the genealogical heart of a person's narrative, their children, is treated in a such a bizarre and psychologically unsatisfactory way.

Not withstanding my comment above, you are not alone in wanting to include the births of children within the body of the parent's narrative, rather than listing them separately below. As I mentioned earlier in this topic, this subject has come up with some consistency over the years.

 

I would have thought that there could be an option in each birth or baptism tag for the user to select that the event is, or is not, reflected on the parents' pages as an event.
 

As I said in a earlier response, this ability does exist, and has from the earliest days of TMG. It is done by adding the parents as Witnesses to the birth tag. Of course, with an existing project of over 10,000 people, adopting this approach now is not very feasible.

 

But you seem to be suggesting a new feature for Birth Group tags - some way of setting them to automatically generate output in the parent's narratives. I see a couple of issues with that. The first is that the parents are not actually associated with the birth tag, unless you have made them Witnesses. That means that the report generator would have to combine information from the Birth tag and the currently Primary Relationship tags to generate the output. I imagine that could be done, but it would not be simple. Another is that presumably the sort date of the birth tag would be used also in the parents' narratives. That would considerably complicate the lives of users who use sort dates to create orderly narratives, since they would have to work around the sort dates of this children's births when trying to organize the narratives of the parents.

 

I would suggest considering an alternate solution: re-design the Relationship tags to include the use of sort dates and Sentences to create output in the parents' narratives. That one isn't simple either, because it is a substantive re-design of how those tags are used, and also because the date, place, and maybe Memo text would have to be extracted from the currently primary Birth tag.

 

I don't think there is a simple solution. :(

 

Although Terry has quite rightly identified that people without children don't get a narrative of their own, there is still the case of my wife who is missing from the Journal report; we have two children, so she should be in the report under her maiden name.

I have no idea why she doesn't appear - something seems amiss. I'd suggest making this a separate topic so it can be addressed and the issue found.

 

Finally, I understand that others, perhaps also feeling that the printed output of their work does not have an outlet entirely to their satisfaction, have turned to electronic alternatives. John Cardinal's Second Site is a really excellent interpretation of TMG data and produces a good looking and flexible result. But there is still a part of me that is wedded to hard copy as an extra security against the future change.

Use of a website solves many of the issues you have identified with outputting a large set of people with complex inter-relationships. It deals easily with the volume of data, deals easily with complex relationships (including those beyond marriage and parent/child), indexing is automatic and easy for the reader to use, and the reader can easily follow any particular line of interest. But I agree with you that it suffers in expected permanence relative to well-done hard copy. Ideally, I think, one might plan on using both, one for ease of use, and the other for long-term permanence.

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Many thanks for your thoughts, Terry. It would be very reassuring to me to have an assured report format. I do not feel that I have an acceptable way of passing on my stuff in hard copy and feel in a kind of uncomfortable limbo. I shall attempt to live a little longer & wait :wacko:

 

Nick

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