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pktropics

Gender symbols on charts - wish list

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I see V.8 is on its way. Can I again register my perennial request that the developers include the facility to include symbols - either triangle and squares or gender symbols (ideally both) - into charts and reports. For those of us working mostly with non-anglo-saxon genealogies, these are essential as names alone do not indicate a person's gender to an anglo-saxon audience; likewise in upper generations where often a person's name is no longer recalled or known, except for colour coding (which is not much use for black and white re-productions), there is no automatic way that a person's gender can be conveniently shown on charts. This facility is available in some other programs, but in the past there seems to have been resistance in the TMG community to this innovation, which I have never understood. Thanks to Virginia and a few other generous users, a few years ago I was introduced to ways of getting around this deficiency, but they are neither very elegant nor simple solutions (though they do work, for which I continue to be grateful those who assisted at the time).

 

I live in hope.

 

pktropics

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I second your wish. There are many grandfathers named Marie or Anne and grandmothers named Claude or Philippe, etc.

 

Also wish that the optional sex symbol could be a corner of the box, so that it does not use up any valuable chart real-estate. A user definable box color based on sex might also be nice, but would not help for b/w charts.

 

Best wishes,

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I second your wish. There are many grandfathers named Marie or Anne and grandmothers named Claude or Philippe, etc.

 

Also wish that the optional sex symbol could be a corner of the box, so that it does not use up any valuable chart real-estate. A user definable box color based on sex might also be nice, but would not help for b/w charts.

 

Best wishes,

 

I agree that VCF should include the facility for displaying boxes with gender symbols.

 

In 2007 Robin made available for download a collection of 6 custom frames, including some with gender symbols. The thread is here. A screenshot of the frames is below:

 

VCF_frames12_23_2009_7_31_15_PM.png

 

Note that the instructions for copying the frames to TMG v7 are in message #5 in that thread.

 

Virginia

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I second your wish. There are many grandfathers named Marie or Anne and grandmothers named Claude or Philippe, etc.

 

Also wish that the optional sex symbol could be a corner of the box, so that it does not use up any valuable chart real-estate. A user definable box color based on sex might also be nice, but would not help for b/w charts.

 

Best wishes,

 

I agree that VCF should include the facility for displaying boxes with gender symbols.

 

In 2007 Robin made available for download a collection of 6 custom frames, including some with gender symbols. The thread is here. A screenshot of the frames is below:

 

post-23-1261615241_thumb.png

 

Note that the instructions for copying the frames to TMG v7 are in message #5 in that thread.

 

Virginia

 

Thanks, Virginia. As you and Robin have demonstrated, it is impossible to draw a true circle or curved or non-horizontal or non-vertical lines in VCF. The smaller the drawn object, the worse it looks.

 

What we wish for are true symbols, at printer resolution, that will vary with and be compatible with box size. For color, it should be the box border or shadow color. The box fill color is more valuable for other user desired purposes (thanks again for showing us how to easily color fill VCF boxes).

 

Best wishes (pun intended),

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I see V.8 is on its way. Can I again register my perennial request that the developers include the facility to include symbols - either triangle and squares or gender symbols (ideally both) - into charts and reports. For those of us working mostly with non-anglo-saxon genealogies, these are essential as names alone do not indicate a person's gender to an anglo-saxon audience; likewise in upper generations where often a person's name is no longer recalled or known, except for colour coding (which is not much use for black and white re-productions), there is no automatic way that a person's gender can be conveniently shown on charts.

<snip>

 

BTW, on the lighter side:

Gender is a grammatical concept.

When referring to biology, the proper word is sex.

It will also get you many more hits from Google. <g>

 

Happy New Year,

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Initiating a discussion about sex vs gender is not necessarily the lightest thing to do. By grammatical I assume you mean linguistic as in the classification of nouns in some romantic and other language families as "masculine" and "feminine". But gender is also a sociological concept used to describe social divisions based upon, but not necessarily coincidental with, anatomical sex, and is used to refer to social, cultural and psychological attributes by which we categorise humans (and often domestic animals as well) as being masculine, feminine, etc.

 

Genealogies may be primarily a biological record (e.g. when used in medical science research and epidemiology), but they are also social/cultural artefacts which record sets of convenionalised social relationships. These are commonly modelled in terms of biological (or these days, genetic) relationships, but they are none the less cultural constructs. For example, in many non-European cultures, no distinction is made in the kinship terminology between siblings and parallel cousins - all are referred to as brothers or sisters; likewise for for mother's sisters and father's brothers, who will be referred to by the saem term as mother and father respectively. Genealogies are based upon, but may not always be the same as, sets of biological relationships.

 

If recording genealogies as sets of purely biological relationships (as in medical research), then it probably is more appropriate to use the term sex. But if the genealogies record what are primarily social relationships, even where these may be modelled upon putative biological relationships, then gender seems to be the more appropriate term.

 

Either way, having ready symbols to clearly distinguish between male and female, whether they be sexes or genders, still makes a lot of sense (to me, at any rate)!

 

pktropics

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Gender or sex gets more confusing as it goes. Consider hermaphroditic beings, which have elements of both.

 

The man who photographed our wedding went to Canada a few years and got reassigned (sex change operation) as a woman. She and her wife are still living together.

 

TMG will not deal with a marriage unless between a man and a woman. Some states allow lesbian or gay unions. I have one friend in a polyamorous marriage (containing 2 men and 2 women).

 

There are polygamous religious colonies, and the reverse is possible in some societies.

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TMG will not deal with a marriage unless between a man and a woman.
Not true. TMG will give you a Warning that the sexes of both parties are the same, but there is nothing to prevent the creation of a TMG Marriage tag between two people of the same sex. You would probably want to create some custom roles and/or sentences for such a tag, but TMG will deal with this just fine.

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TMG will not deal with a marriage unless between a man and a woman.
Not true. TMG will give you a Warning that the sexes of both parties are the same, but there is nothing to prevent the creation of a TMG Marriage tag between two people of the same sex. You would probably want to create some custom roles and/or sentences for such a tag, but TMG will deal with this just fine.

 

 

Agreed. TMG also supports a 3rd sex = unknown. You can also , obviously, have any number of multiple marriages.

Any type of strange marriages can be recorded in TMG. Any, even biologically impossible, parentages are also supported.

Enjoy.

 

Best wishes,

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The issue within the VCf usage is that independent of whether you can create a marriage between 2 persons, that is only half the story. It is my belief that VCF will show such primary same gender relationships in a descendancy-based chart, but it requires both the primary mother and primary father links to be present for male-male or female-female families with children. That is, one person of a couple must be designated as the primary father and the other as the primary mother of the child for the links to show on the chart. This is one of the consequences of using a methodology to represent something for which it was not designed.

 

Gender/sex of members of a relationship, the family structure and the genetic relationships get confused. No charting software that I know adequately and distinctly deals with this same-gender problem or the problem of showing both birth and adoptive parents on the same chart. The reality is that such family structure are becoming more common. An agreed method of handling more than one parent of a given gender needs to be agreed on before most software can chart this. Of course, the question of multiple primary parents of the same gender has implications on all sorts of internals within the software so the issue is not easy to fix.

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The issue within the VCf usage is that independent of whether you can create a marriage between 2 persons, that is only half the story. It is my belief that VCF will show such primary same gender relationships in a descendancy-based chart, but it requires both the primary mother and primary father links to be present for male-male or female-female families with children. That is, one person of a couple must be designated as the primary father and the other as the primary mother of the child for the links to show on the chart. This is one of the consequences of using a methodology to represent something for which it was not designed.

 

Gender/sex of members of a relationship, the family structure and the genetic relationships get confused. No charting software that I know adequately and distinctly deals with this same-gender problem or the problem of showing both birth and adoptive parents on the same chart. The reality is that such family structure are becoming more common. An agreed method of handling more than one parent of a given gender needs to be agreed on before most software can chart this. Of course, the question of multiple primary parents of the same gender has implications on all sorts of internals within the software so the issue is not easy to fix.

 

I do agree, completely, if you settle for the unedited TMG chart output.

 

As you have previously mentioned, VCF makes it so easy to modify your chart to the way you want it. In the original topic under discussion, it would be quick and painless to hand-edit a chart to what is desired.

 

Best wishes,

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As Mike notes, you can easily edit the VCF chart. Furthermore, you could have the TMG internal SEX flag be set to 'M' for a person, but modify all their (default) sentence output to say "she" instead of "he", and vice versa. No one but you needs to know that the internal TMG flag for that person is the letter 'M' or 'F'. This "trick" will let you set one person as "Mother" and the other as "Father", and as long as you customize all output sentences, a same-sex linkage can be shown in VCF as well as all other "ancestor" and "descendant" reports just as you might desire. Of course this is very a non-standard use of this typically genetic linkage. But you can customize TMG to make it do whatever you want with these non-standard linkages, even for VCF.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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