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Morbius

Reports to Tell Family Stories

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My daughter and I have been using my TMG database to write up a series of short papers telling some of the family stories I have collected over the years (e.g., the little girl who died from eating poison berries, the uncle who drove cross-country with his infant son's casket, etc.).  Such stories are an important and interesting part of genealogy, and I want to make sure the are told and not lost.

I have been generating the raw sentence structure for these stories with a combination of the "Individual Narrative Preview with Sources" for data about the subject of the story and the "Family Group Sheet" for data about that subject's children.  I am wondering if the might be a simpler way, or if anyone would have some suggestions for improving the process of generating these tales for publication.

The papers are relatively short (about 15 printed pages) and are grouped into stories about related people (e.g. great-grandparents and their family as they settled into a small Missouri town - they settled there because that is where their horse died).  There are about  half dozen such stories per paper, and each story generally consists of how the subject is related (their link to the original immigrant and how they are related to those who will be reading the stories), a bit about their life (including their children, where they resided, etc.), and then the actual tale which caused them to be in the report.

to do this I am generating an Individual Narrative and FGS for each subject in the paper, including bibliography and endnotes.  My daughter and I then cluge these into a single tale .  We add some additional research to fill out the story (the berry story, above, turned out to be true - not all of them are, and that is part of the fun of the paper - and we added some information on the berries, and what information we could find about that particular malady).  We then add what photographs we have of the subject, do some editing.  We then collect the tales together into a singe paper  and have the paper printed locally.

We have completed three such papers and are working on the fourth and I am wondering if the might be a simpler way, or if anyone would have some suggestions for improving the process of generating these tales for publication (actually self-publication).

 

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I may be the wrong person to weigh in here, because I use TMG in a much simpler way than most people. I use few tags: BMDB and census. But I have a Note tag which I append with a sort date after the death/burial dates. The Note is a text narrative for all of the person's other information with embedded citations. It has as many paragraphs as needed and can be modified to read as any biographical narrative. It can include buying and selling of property, moving place to place, military service and, of course, any interesting stories, such as you mention. 

Perhaps too simplistic for what you are trying to do. Just a thought. I have done a couple of traditional genealogy books for family this way by embedding the photos, documents and maps into the text before having them published.

Sally V. Houston

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I am always interested in how others use TMG, and it seems we have similar ideas.  I tend to use the general note tag (though have made some modified tags, such as a note tag with double carriage throughs to separate long notes and quotes from normal tags), and I don't spend much time modifying sentence structure looking for the perfect sentence out of TMG.  One thing I have been trying to do is figure out how to figure out how to get the "Individual Narrative Preview with Sources" to generate sentences on children with endnotes.  That is why I have to generate both the narrative and the FGS report, the latter to get notes on children into the report. 

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20 minutes ago, Morbius said:

One thing I have been trying to do is figure out how to figure out how to get the "Individual Narrative Preview with Sources" to generate sentences on children with endnotes.  That is why I have to generate both the narrative and the FGS report, the latter to get notes on children into the report. 

Would a one or two-generation Journal work better for you? If so, set up one with the options you want and add it to the custom toolbar so you can use it as a preview tool.

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In addition to Terry's suggestion about looking at the Journal report, I recommend looking at Terry's web pages about tricks to produce publishable output.  He has a number of suggestions and advanced customizations which can cause TMG to produce very readable narratives.  See:

https://tmg.reigelridge.com/publishable.htm

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