Does TMG have place to input historical "group" or "organization

[kbarrett 0]

Bob (or anyone else out there),

 

Looking for Software with Organization or Group Entry/Lists

I am evaluating several different family history software applications right now. I am interested in doing historical research relating to small towns in Northwest Washington State and have been looking for software that implements a data model that would work well for this type of research (software that allows for heavy documenting and researching of places and organizations or groups that were there at some point IN ADDITION TO people and families that lived there which is more of the focus of family history software)

 

Build or Buy, That is the Question

After several years of being torn between building my own software and finding something that ALMOST meets my needs, I have come to the conclusion that if I want to get anything done, I'd better just find something on the market rather than trying to build from scratch. Enter the GENTECH data model. I love it. It implements almost every aspect of the data model that I had created on my own, and then some.

 

Discovery that TMG Implements GENTECH DATA MODEL

I found out yesterday, after a considerable time on the 'Net, that TMG was developed by (or at least owned) one of the core contributors of the GENTECH Data Model, so I downloaded it and have been playing a little with it. Wow! What a great piece of software. If this is your work (Bob), I take my hat off to you.

 

Need for GROUP or ORGANIZATION Entry (Master List of Sorts)

There is one need that I have that I'm not sure I get with TMG and that is the implementation of Groups as is in the GENTECH Data Model. I would like to have the ability to keep track of what groups (civic groups, Churches, corporations, clubs, etc.) were in a particular town at a particular time and then link people and events to these groups. Does TMG or some other software have this capability?

 

Alternative Recommendations Wanted

If not, what would you recommend for a method or work-around for getting this information and integrating it with other data like the data already in TMG or other family history software packages.

 

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Edited October 7, 2005 by kbarrett

[Jim Byram 0]

I would like to have the ability to keep track of what groups (civic groups, Churches, corporations, clubs, etc.) were in a particular town at a particular time and then link people and events to these groups.

TMG has been used for projects of this type since its beginning.

 

There is an approach and a feature that allow this.

 

1) The approach - Create 'people' such as a church or a corporation or an organization or a census or a building. Literally, enter any entity as a person.

 

2) The feature - Make use of the event tag 'witness' feature to link people and church-people or corporation-people or organization-people.

 

An event tag can be linked to two Principals and an unlimited number of Other Witnesses. A 'witness' is any person associated with an event.

 

So you create a 'person' named Elk Lodge #1102. You create a custom event named 1920 Membership List. You link as an other witness every person in your database who was on that 1920 membership list. Now you have the organization and all persons in that 1920 membership list tied together. You can create an appropriate event for each happening in the history of that organization with all associated people linked to each event. If the organization changed names, you create a new name tag with the appropriate date.

 

You can create reports for the organization-person or for the real people. For each linked person, the 'witnessed' event will show up in his/her Person view and reports.

 

An entity-person could have children. Say that the organization-person, Elks Lodge #1102 split into North Shore and South Shore lodges. Each could be a new identity and a new person.

 

I think that you can see that the possibilities are endless for building a complex integrated database tying together the people and the 'entity-people' in your database. And this would appear to satisfy your basic requirements.

 

More...

 

You also wanted to deal with different towns. You could enter Place-people and appropriate event tags to tie all entity-people to the town. However, you'd probably not need place-people since each event tag for a person or entity-person will have date and place data.

 

You could use the place data for the event tags for each entity person to generate reports. For example, you could generate a List of People report with a filter - Name contains ELK LODGE - to get a list of the Elk Lodges for all towns.

 

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