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FisherMichaelC

Unmarried couple with child

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If there is no event in the Marriage tag type group linking the spouses (the most common being Marriage), then they won't be treated as spouses. You can always create a custom shared tag in the Other tag type group or use a shared Note tag to document their relationship.

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Mr Byram thank you for your reply. I am probably what you call a novice using TMG. Even though there is no marriage tag, on the family group sheet spouse is put in front of their names. I should have said this in my original post.

 

I was wondering if there is a way to change the word spouse to mother and father on the family group sheet. On other reports (individual) that I have tried it is not a problem.

 

Again thank you for your assistance. Since I upload my genealogy to a website I have that uses GEDCOM, I don't like creating custom tags, but I will try the shared note tag.

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As Jim says, TMG itself does not consider the parents married unless you create a Marriage Tag for them. However, traditional genealogy expects parents to be married, and I'm afraid that TMG's Family Group Sheet follows that tradition, as you note. The only workable way to fix that that I know of is to send the FGS to Word, and edit the term there.

 

While a GEDCOM itself will not make the two parents married if there is no marriage tag, the receiving application may well follow the traditional norm and assert that they were even without a marriage tag. For example, in an Ancestry tree, the "Profile view" labels the other parent a Spouse, just like TMG's FGS.

 

You can create a custom Tag to explain the situation, or even use a standard tag like Note. But unless that tag is carefully constructed it will not comply with GEDCOM standards, and will not be included in the GEDCOM you make. Even if you avoid that issue, it may well not be displayed by the receiving application in any useful way. Again using an Ancestry tree as an example, the explanation text entered in the Memo field of the tag will be buried in a citation where most readers will never find it. The best you can do is make the name of the tag self-explanatory.

 

If this is important to you, we can help you create a tag that will export to GEDCOM, but then you would have to test with the website you are exporting to to see whether that results in a useful result.

 

You don't describe the purpose of exporting to the website. If it is to share your data with others, I'd suggest you consider building your own site with the TMG companion program Second Site, which does output your TMG data accurately. For more on that, see the Second Site section of my website, URL below.

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Terry, thank you for your reply, but for now I'll live with this very minor problem. The website I have will be for sharing with family and the program I use is PhpGedView and exporting a GEDCOM from TMG and uploading it to the site is fairly easy.

 

Again thank you Terry and Jim.

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Hi Michael,

 

As you note, PhpGedView can only display what can be expressed in GEDCOM. But the GEDCOM standard, which is unchanged for at least 30 years, simply has no way to express many, many of the genealogical relationships and data which can now be easily expressed in modern genealogy programs like TMG. If you start using very many of the normal features of TMG, I believe you will soon find they are either not exportable to GEDCOM, or (like this "spouse" issue) are not able to be accurately expressed in GEDCOM.

 

I can understand the desire to use PhpGedView. It can be a very nice way to get family members to view and collaborate on a family tree. But I would highly recommend only using it to describe the existence of various ancestors and their very basic data. In my opinion if you try to use it to provide a more full picture of the lives of these ancestors you will find yourself constantly frustrated by little things like you are already noticing. Not because of PhpGedView, but because of the built-in limitations of GEDCOM. However, to aid in restricting your data to basic information, the TMG Export Wizard can limit the GEDCOM export to only certain people in your TMG database, and can restrict the export to only selected TMG Tag Types, such as only Birth, Marriage, Death, and Burial.

 

If you do not need or want your ancestors to be able to modify a posted tree, but do want to share all the information you discover about your ancestors, I would strongly support Terry's recommendation to consider the very inexpensive SecondSite companion software. I am just a user of TMG like yourself, and have no relationship with John Cardinal, author of SecondSite, but use it myself to generate CDs of web pages to share with my relatives. There are many companies offering the service of posting web pages, but if you are looking for a site to post these web pages with privacy, John also offers such an Internet service, also at what I consider a minimal cost. Using SecondSite to create the web pages from TMG, and then uploading them to his site is extremely easy.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Thanks Michael, I will certainly consider using Secondsite in the future. For now because of my continued unemployment it will have to wait. I first want to upgrade from TMG7 to TMG8 when I can. Phpgedview is free and therefore more affordable in my current situation. However, your reasoning does give me evidence of what I should do when able.

 

Thank you

Mike

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OK, that makes things a LOT easier they probably have all the permissions, etc. setup for PhpGedView. It is a bit of a project to get all the files uploaded, database setup, and permissions set.

I did a PhpGedView site before I discovered Webtrees. I haven't updated it since I set it up. IMO Second Site does much better with TMG data.

You can check out my Webtrees site here: http://www.gilbert-genealogy.info/webtrees/index.php

Edited by ggilbert1

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