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wingfield

Enhanced GEDCOM question

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folks,

 

I'm trying to understand the enhanced GEDCOM export option in TMG. I've clicked it and exported. for a particular witnessed event, I get the below for the person (in other words I'm showing the entire person, not just the event)

 

0 @I2819@ INDI
1 NAME Susanna /Theno/
2 SOUR @S944@
3 QUAY 3
3 NOTE {TMG Surety 3....}
1 SEX F
1 CHAN
2 DATE 24 DEC 2015
1 BIRT
2 DATE 18 DEC 1864
2 _SDATE 18 DEC 1864
2 PLAC Chicago, Cook, Illinois, USA
2 SOUR @S944@
3 QUAY 3
3 NOTE {TMG Surety 3.33.}
1 BAPM
2 DATE 08 JAN 1865
2 _SDATE 08 JAN 1865
2 PLAC St. Peter's Catholic Church, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, USA
2 _SHAR @I1370@
3 ROLE Witness
2 _SHAR @I1371@
3 ROLE Witness
2 SOUR @S944@
3 QUAY 3
3 NOTE {TMG Surety 3.33.}
1 FAMC @F898@
I then import the gedcom (entire thing. above is simply an extract to help illustrate my question) into TNG. hopefully, there are some folks familiar with TNG, because perhaps the answer is related to what I'm importing the gedcom to??? anyway, when I look at the person who witnessed the above event - specifically person 1370 - I get the below (sorry, I don't know how to include attachments, or I'd show a print screen).
TNG shows the below for the witness person.
baptism
08 Jan 1865
St. Peter's Catholic Church, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, USA
role : witness
what it does not show is who the baptism is for (ie: person 2819). any thoughts on why this is the case? I guess my simple answer is that TNG simply doesn't pull in every line of a gedcom; but on the chance that it's another reason, I'd be interested to know.
thank you,
David

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Hi David,

 

You are observing the issue that TMG has many more capabilities to identify and link data than the extremely limited decades-old GEDCOM format can possibly handle. As many of us have been saying repeatedly over the years, if you use the features of TMG and then export your TMG to GEDCOM you will lose a lot of data and linkage information. One way to think of this is that you cannot put two gallons of milk in a pint jar. If you pour all your milk into the jar, then when you pour what winds up in the pint jar back into your 2-gallon jug there is only one pint of milk in the bottom. You poured your TMG into GEDCOM and lots spilled over. When you pour it back into TMG it become real obvious what is missing.

 

I have posted two different web pages to try to help explain all of this. One page only talks about GEDCOM export. The link to the discussion of the enhanced GEDCOM Export on that page is here.

 

A separate chapter of my more extensive on-line book about TMG covers both export and import, including export and import of GEDCOM. It contains all of the above page and much more. The link to the portion of that chapter which also discusses enhanced GEDCOM export details is here.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

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Hello Michael,

 

I very much appreciate your response. I'll certainly read both your links and actually look forward to it. I'm going to guess that it will add a great deal of understanding to gedcom's and how I might make more robust imports into TNG (The Next Generation genealogy program - not to be confused with TMG :>)

 

I understand your pint / gallon analogy; but the thing I still don't get is that in the gedcom it has the person who is being witnessed. in other words, the data field I'm interested in made it from the gallon (TMG) to the pint (gedcom). given this, I'm guessing it must be a TNG thing; though TNG is supposed to import gedcom 5.5 in it's entirety as I understand it. I may have just answered my own question though - TMG witnesses are part of "enhanced" gedcom from TMG, not 5.5. hmm.

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Michael,

 

I've started reading the two links you've provided. they will take several readings to fully digest; but wow - awesome information you've provided. thank you!

 

David

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The witness export using the enhanced GEDCOM export option creates a custom extension of the GEDCOM file. This is allowed under the GEDCOM specs but it doesn't mean that another program can import it. RootsMagic and Legacy use this particular GEDCOM customization and can import the witnesses. TNG would need to have code to import the customization and it doesn't appear to be able to deal with the data since it's non-standard.

 

The import is a TNG issue and that's where you should ask your questions about the import there.

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David,

 

As you yourself note "TMG witnesses are part of "enhanced" gedcom from TMG, not 5.5" and as Jim has tried to further explain, the witness concept is foreign to GEDCOM and not a part of its standard. But GEDCOM does define a construct for any non-standard data/text to be included within the GEDCOM file. This construct is what TMG uses to at least output some information about witnesses and other non-standard TMG information.

 

Perhaps some history would help. Note that this enhanced export option was only introduced in V9.04, just weeks before the last TMG version ever to be released. In my opinion it demonstrates the great concern the TMG developers had for its users that their final effort was to try to ensure as much information as possible would be able to be exported from TMG to minimize the loss of all the effort done by the users to enter that data into TMG. While that exported GEDCOM data is non-standard, it has been output in a standardized and consistent fashion. Thus if other programs will add the code to recognize it, they could import it appropriately and prevent it from being lost. At worst most programs will import and store "somewhere" such non-standard data (as you discovered in TNG) so that it can be referred to for whatever manual efforts required to re-introduce the data in the new program. And even if a program does not do that, any GEDCOM file is simply a text file and thus the user can read the file and still have access to that information for manual re-introduction.

 

So, to echo Jim, if your goal is import into TNG, then you need to lobby the developers of TNG to add the code to their program to recognize these non-standard but consistently structured GEDCOM extensions and import its data appropriately. Feel free to point them to my web posts to aid them in understanding what code they would need to create.

 

Hope that helps explain,

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