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chornung

Journal Report - Group common birth places

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In a Journal report, when selecting the Miscellaneous option to Group common birth places, is there any way to get a comma to separate the previous phrase from the "born in" phrase?

 

Currently I get the following output: "Children of Mary Ann Smith and Joe Brown all born in Evansville, Indiana, are as follows:" There really should be a comma after the father's last name, but I don't see where to change that.

 

Again, this is in a Journal Report, only when Group common birth places is selected on the Miscellaneous tab.

 

Thanks! ~Carol

Edited by chornung

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I feel the same way about this -- I've deal with it by writing my journal reports to Word. I've written a macro which makes the very changes for which you are campaigning and also changes "the children of x and y were as follows" to "the children of x and y were:" It's very easy to record such a macro. Once the macro is written, a single keystroke makes the changes for the entire report. I'm away from my main machine at the moment, but if you wish I'll be glad to post the exact macro text in a day or two.

 

HTH

 

Robert

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This is about proper grammar - which TMG makes an effort to follow in the reports.

 

Carol is right that a comma is appropriate after the father's last name. That is where you pause when reading.

 

In Robert's preferred usage, a colon is not grammatically correct after 'were'. In the case of a list the introductory statement must be able to stand alone, ergo 'as follows:'

 

Virginia

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Virginia is quite right. I'm in no position to discuss grammatical rules, but I have consulted my battered Chicago Manual of Style. The colon should not be used before a series that serves as the object of a verb. My preferred usage would be correct without the colon: "the children of x and y were a,b,c and d. (note the absence of the Oxford comma which I use on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday but not on Monday, Wednesday or Friday).

 

Simplicity is probably better served by "the children of Adam and Eve were Cain and Abel," but I wonder if "the children of Adam and Eve were as follows: Cain and Abel" isn't clearer in a genealogical report, especially if there are more than two children . What think?

 

I agree with both Carol and Virginia about the comma after the father's last name.

 

 

R.

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I have a different problem with the option „Group common birth places“ for the following situation :

Older data from our church books report the christening date for a child and the birth place where the parents lived. The actual birth date is not available. For these cases I have used a non primary birth tag with an empty date field and a birth location (LB) followed by a primary christening tag with both the date and the location of the church (parish, LC). The birth location and the parish are in most cases not identical. The journal report with « Group common birth places » cannot handle this situation correctly : it takes the location for « all born at … » from the primary christening tag (LC) and not from the birth tag. The Birth location is ignored. I assume that the problem is caused by the fact that both tags belong to the same tag group and that the common birth place is taken from the primary tag and not from the actual birth tag. This makes the gouping option useless for me.

Max

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Max,

 

There is a solution to your issue, though it has to be applied to each family to which it applies. You can add a Narrative Children tag and construct the Sentence to say what you want about the birth and christening places. See my article on Customizing the “Children of” Statement for some examples of how to do this.

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Thank you Terry. Your suggestion is a good way to solve the problem. However, I am afraid that it is somewhat late for me to add a new tag to each familiy. My database comprises more than 12000 individuals ...

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I am afraid that it is somewhat late for me to add a new tag to each family...

 

Actually, Max, it may not be too late. John Cardinal's wonderful TMG Utility has a feature where you can add a whole group of events to a TMG database all at once based on a text file. But you would need to create the specially formatted text file containing the IDs of all the couples that would need the Narrative Children tag Terry mentioned, along with the text you want. It might be a little work, but TMG reports and Flags could probably help a lot, and it would be way, way less than doing them one family at a time.

 

I would probably start by creating a temporary Flag which could be set as Secondary Output from a report. Then set the Flag to identify all people who had at least one child. Now I would run a report (probably some form of List of Events of Primary Marriage group tags) output to a text file to get a list of both Principals who are couples where both Principals have children (have that Flag set). This is just my first guess of what you might need, and you may have to try a few things with filters and Flags to get just the right list of couples. One would also probably need to be careful that not to have duplicates, etc.

 

Then I'd open that text file in a text editor and do some global search/replace commands to reformat the file the way that the TMG Utility needs it to be to add the Narrative Children tags. I think this would work.

 

As always when using the TMG Utility, be sure to try it first in "Log Only" mode so it will create a log of what it "would" have done but won't actually change the database. And when you actually run the Utility to change the database, backup your database first. Then you can see if it does what you want, and still be able to revert to the backup if you don't like it.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Thank you Michael for the idea to add the tag to selected families. I will have a careful look at the textfile needed for the TMG Utility.

Max

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