Duplicating or copying an entire tag.

[Jonsops 0]

I am entering data for a family of 2 adults and 5 children.

For about 10 years and several changes of location, the place of residence is identical for all.
How do I duplicate or copy the tags from one family member to all the others without having to re-enter it for each.
Overall there are about 9 tags each which means having to create 63 tags when 9 will do the job.

Using f3 just doesn't cut down the workload enough,

[Terry Reigel 0]

Jonsops,

 

My first suggestion would be to enter them all a Witnesses in a single Tag. That would seem especially appropriate for families with children. But if that doesn't work in your situation perhaps the next best approach is to enter one Tag and use the Copy Tag command on the Add menu to make duplicates. You can then change the ID#s in the copies to move them to the other people.

 

I find the Copy Tag command so useful I have added it as a button on my custom toolbar.

[Jonsops 0]

Thanks Terry,

I have used witness for some of my own family members to try it out. Definitely does the job.

But I need to get my head around the proper use of tags because it seems to produce a superflous tag (I work in aviation engineering where we strive to not duplicate data).

e.g. My wife definitely witnessed the birth of our son, so should she be added as a witness? and then a witness to his arrival home (residence) a week later?
Also I witnessed the same birth and then become a witness to the same event as my wife for his residence. Another seemingly superflous tag.
The next entry in both our tag lists is then 'son-Bio" which must exist.

 

I would welcome further feedback from you about this.

 

I tried the Copy Tag command in the Add tag window but only ended up with a duplicate template, not a copy of the tag with details filled in, which is the cause of my post.
Then the penny dropped and I looked on the 'Add' dropdown on the menu bar and there it was.
Your advice worked a treat.. Copy simplifies the above situation.

John

[Terry Reigel 0]

John,

 

Some thoughts on using Witnesses...

 

First, don't restrict your thinking about Witnesses to the concept of physically seeing an event. Think of it also as a participant, or one effected by the event. For example, some users add a widow or widower to a spouse's death tag, not because they actually saw the death, but because they were widowed by it, a significant life event. Likewise, you can enter heirs and executors to a will tag because they are named in the will, not because they actually saw it be drawn up.

 

As to why one would choose to add a Witness to a tag. I see two reasons, only partly related. One is that you have several people involved in the same event and you want to record it for each of them. A good example is a Census tag, where everyone in the household was enumerated. Another is a Moved or Immigration tag where a family moved to a new location together. By using Witnesses you enter the details once, and then each person has the tag appearing for them. With this approach, each person has in essence their own tag for the event, but there is really only one Tag, and you only had to enter it once. (One caution - if transferring your data by GEDCOM is important to you, GEDCOM doesn't recognize witnesses so none of the Witnesses will have the tag appear in the GEDCOM.)

 

A somewhat separate use of Witnesses is so in a report about one person you can have other participants mentioned who shared events. For example, many users construct their census tags so that in the narrative of the head of household all the other members are mentioned. Doing this requires creating custom Sentences, as the standard Sentences do not mention other participants. This subject is described in some of the articles on my website (link below).

 

This last gets to your question about entering the mother as Witness to the birth of your children. TMG's genealogy reports display the children in various ways, but they do not include their births within the body of the parents' narratives. If you wanted to do that, you could enter one or both parents as Witnesses in the children's birth tags.

 

These last applications of Witnesses require that you construct custom Sentences for the Witnesses. It makes little sense for a mother's narrative to say she "...witnessed the birth of Jonnie on {date} {place}..." which is what the standard Sentence for Witnesses would produce. Instead, you would probably want something like "Her son Jonnie was born {date} {place}..." Use of Roles, also discussed on my site, is helpful in getting these kinds of results.

 

In the end, you can use Witnesses to cut down on the creation of duplicate tags, or to produce richer narratives, or both. Whether it makes sense for you to use them as ways to enrich output depends on what results you have in mind.

[Jonsops 0]

Thanks Terry,

I appreciate your explanation. Now I will need to review my entry method to put it into practice and then edit to remove the duplications.
To date I have only produced heirarchy type reports such as 'Descendants of .......'.

I am looking into producing narratives and can see that I will have to learn more about sentence construction.

 

If I edit the sentence construction in a tag assigned to a person, does the edit apply only to that person, or does it change all tags of that type?

 

I have bookmarked your 'Terry's TMG Tips' page. Lots and lots of reading to do there. Thanks for putting so much work into it.

I see that the TMG user guide is 480 pages and your work expands more on that so there's a lot to learn about using TMG effectively.

 

I don't plan to use GEDCOM any time soon so there's no problem.

 

Regards, John

[Terry Reigel 0]

John,

 

Sentences can be modified in two places - in individual Tags, and in the Tag Type. Changes made to individual Tags only apply to that Tag. Changes made to Tag Types apply to all Tags of that type, provided that a change has not been made to the individual Tag, in which case that remains unchanged.

 

When you get into customizing Sources, the same concept applies. Changes made to Templates of individual Sources apply to only that Source, while changes made to Source Types apply to all Sources of that type except to those in which a change has been made individually.

 

With regard to GEDCOM, most of the advanced features that make TMG worth while do not translate to GEDCOM. So if you are going to make use of the more worthwhile features of TMG you need to restrict use of GEDCOM to the most basic data, if you use it at all.