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Stephen Hansen

Changing the given name for living individuals

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I have a need to upload one of my larger projects to a public site but I feel it necessary to make a reasonable attempt to protect the data of those in the project that are living, or at least not known to be deceased. When exporting the data to a GEDCOM file, TMGv7 is certainly capable of allowing me to automatically limit the tags and events for those whose LIVING flag does not have a value of "N". However, in addition I would like to alter the given name of those individuals to something like "Living" or "Withheld". Since there are over 1200 individuals in the project who don't have LIVING=N, doing this by hand is not an attractive option. Can anyone suggest a way to do this?

 

Even adding a unique tag to individuals based on the value of the LIVING flag would allow me to throw a simple script together to filter the resulting GEDCOM file.

 

I apologize in adavance if this has been asked and answered here before, but I couldn't find it in any of the searches I've done.

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Stephen,

 

I find the simplest solution is to just exclude living people from the upload. You can do this by using the living flag in a filter in the Project Explorer, selecting the resulting people, then using that to determine who gets included in the GEDCOM.

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Hi Stephen,

 

I agree with Terry that the safest is to not even include the people. But, if you really want to include them, yet simply change their names, then...

 

I would first make a temporary COPY of the project (using TMG). Then, working with the copy, I would use the TMG Utility, and its "Change Name Parts" feature. As stated in TMG Utility's documentation:

Change Name Parts will change name parts (title, given name, surname, etc.) under the control of one or more filters and one or more actions.
Thus you could filter based on a flag, and then change the name parts as desired. See the TMG Utility documentation for more details.

 

You copy the project because the TMG Utility actually changes the names within the project. Now you can export from that changed project, then delete that temporary project.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Michael and Terry,

 

Thank you for your suggestions, but leaving out all living individuals completely would kind of defeat the purpose of the web site I was uploading the data to.

 

I had looked into using the TMG Utility to replace the given name part, but the filter options didn't appear to allow me to create a filter based on the presence or value of a TMG flag (i.e. LIVING), only on certain aspects of the various NAME tags. After staring at it for a while, I noticed the flag filter button at the bottom of the window (duh!) This was exactly what I was looking for and have been able to alter a copy of the project as I had intended. Had all of the filter options been grouped together on the page I would have noticed it earlier, but I'm guessing that it was done this way to be consistent with some of the other pages.

 

Thank you for your help.

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