wishlist - approximate age

[John Garvert 0]

I would like to see approximate dates produced in sentence structures when I have an individual for whom I only have a year for birth and death dates.

Per 22 August 2005, Issue 2005, Number 10, I see in TMG v6.02 approximate dates were printed for <[A]> but removed in v6.03, and which explained the pros, cons and reasoning, link .

 

I might propose an alternate approach.

Add an Age Approximate [AA] variable, similar to the way the [A] Age variable already has a [AE] Age Exact variant.

Then the TMG user can decide if they want to use the less accurate age at format, without impacting existing users.

 

I'm a new user, convert from FTM, and first post, I hope this is where to make product update suggestions.

 

Tx for your time

[dahill 0]

I would like to see approximate dates produced in sentence structures when I have an individual for whom I only have a year for birth and death dates.

Per 22 August 2005, Issue 2005, Number 10, I see in TMG v6.02 approximate dates were printed for <[A]> but removed in v6.03, and which explained the pros, cons and reasoning, link .

 

I might propose an alternate approach.

Add an Age Approximate [AA] variable, similar to the way the [A] Age variable already has a [AE] Age Exact variant.

Then the TMG user can decide if they want to use the less accurate age at format, without impacting existing users.

 

I'm a new user, convert from FTM, and first post, I hope this is where to make product update suggestions.

 

Tx for your time

Can you give an example of a sentence using the new [AA] variable ?

Would you see this as being more useful for certain types of tags? which ones?

Douglas Hill

[John Garvert 0]

Can you give an example of a sentence using the new [AA] variable ?

Would you see this as being more useful for certain types of tags? which ones?

Douglas Hill

 

Similar to any sentence you where you would use a [A], [AO], [A1], [A2], [AE], [AOE], [A1E], [A2E], [RA:role] or [RE:role] variable, let the user use the appropriate [AA] or [RAA:role].

- If complete dates are available, [AA] would works identical to [A].

- When a date only has a year component, display the approximate age, using a similar format already used in an individual's Detail Window Age column, e.g. ~31, or >=31. In these situation, [A] does not generate an age. Note: the situation with age ranges generating the average age still exists (see newsletter), but the user has more options on how to deal with this, like a unique sentence structure using [A], and more importantly, existing users NOT using the new [AA] feature are not impacted.

Because of the existing syntax convention with roles using using [RE:role] instead of [RAE:role], [RAA:role] might be confusing and using a single letter (other than 'A' which is already in use) might be appropriate, but I have not been privy to the TMG software/user interface design team roadmap, so whatever syntax seems logical to them would work.

 

An example:

A witness sentence for the a Death tag with a role wSon1:

"<[D]> <[RAA:wSon1],> [W] survived the death of his< [AA] year old> father [P] <[WM]>"

to produce a witness sentence like:

"In 1863 at age ~14, John Q. Public survived the death of his ~91 year old father Jack Public."

using existing [A] age variable I get.

"In 1863 John Q. Public survived the death of his father John Q. Public."

 

Possible tags:

The tags I see it being used with most are Birth and Death tags, possibly Marriage tags, in the Individual Narrative reports. But each user could have their own uses for various tags since TMG is so flexible to user customizations.

If a user defines a lot of specific roles (like I do to circumvent the "feature" where [W] is desired to be one person, but [RA:role] may print ages for 10 people, but that's another issue ), then the [RAA:specific-role] could be used in-place of [RA:specific-role] to show the age of [W], since there is no [WA] or [WAE] variable (another new feature that would be nice). What would really be nice is some new variables similar to [PAR] to identify siblings, children, spouse, but I have not yet thought out the the details of that, but making all these witness links for family members takes a lot of time, and I know the TMG s/w should have the potential to gather this data automatically. Is there an obvious simple way to do this I've missed?

 

I have a family member that has requested narratives that show a person's age (principal or witness) at the time of an event, especially for witnesses with multiple specific roles defined for each witness in birth and death tags. She would rather know someone was approximately 31 rather than have no information and have to break her line of though on the circumstances and context to find the appropriate dates and do the math with each sentence. I agree.

 

As a new TMG user but experienced professional s/w programmer, there are lots of improvements to the rules I would make to the way variables for Principal and Witness roles are implemented & behave in sentences, but I think the entire concept is a great idea. But as a programmer, I also understand how features evolve, backwards compatability must be maintained, deadlines met, and with hind-sight alternate design decisions to user interfaces might have been made, and obvious changes cannot be made without pissing off your entire user community. This addition seemed to be a reasonable compromise between the user interface changes I would like to see versus a non-trivial UI redesign I would really like to see.