Multiple Primary Tags

[Pierce.Reid 0]

The manual specifies that only one tag of a specific type may be designated as "primary", so that it will print out in a Journal type report.

 

What do you do if you have several tags of the same type which you want printed out in the correct time sequence? For example, you may have several "occupation" and "residence" tags as the subject changed jobs and cities several times during their life. I want this information to be printed out in the correct time sequence, and no one tag is any more "important" than any other.

 

It looks like I might have to create new tag types "occupation1", "occupation2", ... and "residence1", residence2",... in order to have unique tag types, but this looks like a lot of extra work because of what seems like an arbitrary limitation of TMG.

 

Pierce Reid

[Paul Lawrence 0]

The manual specifies that only one tag of a specific type may be designated as "primary", so that it will print out in a Journal type report.

 

What do you do if you have several tags of the same type which you want printed out in the correct time sequence? For example, you may have several "occupation" and "residence" tags as the subject changed jobs and cities several times during their life. I want this information to be printed out in the correct time sequence, and no one tag is any more "important" than any other.

 

It looks like I might have to create new tag types "occupation1", "occupation2", ... and "residence1", residence2",... in order to have unique tag types, but this looks like a lot of extra work because of what seems like an arbitrary limitation of TMG.

 

Pierce Reid

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Print out where? If you want them in a narrative such as the Journal Report or Individual Narrative you select "All variations and witnessed events" under the Tags tab under the Options. The only limitation is on charts where space is limited and where I would include tags of the types you mentioned anyway.

[mosh 0]

The manual specifies that only one tag of a specific type may be designated as "primary", so that it will print out in a Journal type report.

 

What do you do if you have several tags of the same type which you want printed out in the correct time sequence? 

 

....this looks like a lot of extra work because of what seems like an arbitrary limitation of TMG.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I have run into this limitation in what would seem to be a fairly common situation - multiple marriages. For example, I have not found it uncommon for an ancestor to have had three wives (the first two having died young), with children from all three marriages. Yet many reports, charts, etc will not include these multiple wives and their descendants without having to perform manual editing acrobatics.

 

Mosh

[Jim Byram 0]

I have run into this limitation in what would seem to be a fairly common situation - multiple marriages.  For example, I have not found it uncommon for an ancestor to have had three wives (the first two having died young), with children from all three marriages.

The Marriage tag for each unique relationship should (and normally would) be marked primary. The same is true for any shared tag. For example, if you have Residence tags shared by person A and person B, person A and person C, and person A and person D, all can be marked primary.

 

In a narrative report, I always output all tags. The primary marking is of no consequence. As Paul says, the primary marker is important when you have a report or chart with limited space. If you have a slot for one Birth tag and have three Birth tags, you would want the one that you preferred to be output marked primary.

[Pierce.Reid 0]

The Marriage tag for each unique relationship should (and normally would) be marked primary. The same is true for any shared tag. For example, if you have Residence tags shared by person A and person B, person A and person C, and person A and person D, all can be marked primary.

 

In a narrative report, I always output all tags. The primary marking is of no consequence. As Paul says, the primary marker is important when you have a report or chart with limited space. If you have a slot for one Birth tag and have three Birth tags, you would want the one that you preferred to be output marked primary.

 

There are, of course, examples of a couple marrying each other several times, either separated by other marriages, or going through the marriage ceremony in different traditions, at different times and places. I suppose for those rare cases, you could use a "marriage2" tag.

 

I don't want to output all tags for an individual, since I have many containing a paragraph of memo text, with a number of "roles" held by related people. For example, a census tag (not a source) will have all individuals in the household linked to various roles. In a Journal report I want the census tag to be output only once, not for each child in the household who is listed later in the report. I also have a relative who was recorded twice in the 1880 census: once at home and once as a visitor in another state. I will never know if his wife misunderstood the census instructions or if he was on a business trip (he was a travelling salesman) who was in different places on the couple of days the census was held.

 

Although the Journal report is the one I am most interested in, I do have a space problem with it. I have a set of journal reports for my ancestors and their siblings that takes up a large binder (printed double sided). It is almost too large to handle now, and I don't want it to grow any larger than it has to. As it is, I manually remove a certain amount of redundant information before I print it, but that is rather tedious.

 

I suppose I could create a dummy second principal for my occupation and residency (and other) tags and put phony people in those roles to create different principal pairs (but ensure they are not reported in the principal role sentence), but that seems like a silly solution.

 

It seems TMG is using the "principal" indicator for two separate functions: to indicate the "key" person (or two people) for the tag, and to control printing when there are several tags of the same type. In many cases those two functions are compatible, but when they are not, there does not seem to be a clean method of controlling them separately.

 

Pierce Reid

[Terry Reigel 0]

Pierce, I think that the "Primary only" method of controlling which tags are printed is just too rudimentary to be useful. It requires the use of silly work-arounds like you describe. When it comes to most reports (excepting charts, which have limited space) there is a much better method. Set the report definition to "All Events" then control what gets printed by the use of the "Selected tag types" control.

 

Using this method requires some discipline in entering the tag information, but so does the primary method. The key is to establish different tag types for events you don't what to print, and for events you might sometimes not want to print. Then you select or not those tag types to include or exclude them.

 

Details are described in my web article on Primary Tags and Printing, and pp 118-120 of GTMOOTMG.