When I'm old and grey ...

[Nick Shelley 0]

While I struggle to insert new research information into TMG, ensure that tag sentences print out with a bearable level of sense and clarity, check for double commas and grammatical errors, prepare reports for friends or fellow researchers and occasionally wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been tempted into this activity without a government health warning some 12 years ago, I am becoming increasingly consumed by one thought

 

… when I am old and grey, how am I going to pass on all this research for family and future researchers of family history? The difficulty of finding an acceptable set of answers nags at me increasingly day by day. After all what is the good of committing so much time and trouble on my research if it will have little more permanence than my own self? Thus I am thinking of leaving the totality of my research to a national genealogy society and perhaps our local archive office. How difficult can that be?

 

At the moment, the issues centre around finding satisfactory ways of leaving behind the genealogical text-based data, the described and associated exhibits (for me, mostly images) and the charts.

 

The text-based data

 

a) Which reports to use

 

One of the unique strengths of a genealogy program is that it orders people and the information about them in generational sequence and thus provides a visible structure of the relationship between peers and relatives. It makes sense therefore to prepare Descendancy Narratives (others prefer the Journal format) based upon the main families and branches that one has researched. For me this involves 36 family names and therefore 36 Descendancy Narrative Reports. These can be individually saved and put together within Book Manager and generated in one go.

 

[unfortunately, I am experiencing a bug in the Descendancy Narrative reports which changes their Subject focus over time as well as a bug in Book Manager which generates strange error reports so these presently undermine the value of the Book Manager. Instead the reports have to be individually checked that the Subject focus is still accurate and then individually generated.]

 

This approach has much to be said for it but it falls short because it does not include one’s research into

 

(i) other families with the same name who may well turn out to be part of the main ancestral tree but who have not yet been connected

(ii) families closely associated with one of one’s own but who are not direct ancestors but who are intimately connected with them and reveal important aspects of one’s own history

(iii) individuals who appear or reappear in family events (pictures, documents, witnesses) who are either relations but of unknown linkage or are people of family importance

(iv) censuses, companies, houses, cars and other historically associated subjects which do not find a linkage within a Descendancy Narrative report

 

Alternatively, lacking the genealogical structuring of the Descendancy Narrative but nevertheless capable of providing complete coverage of the subject matter within a TMG project, the Individual Narrative can be applied to all subjects in one report. This is the nearest that TMG comes to a paper backup of its contents.

 

Practically easy to set up, the whole-project Individual Narrative quickly hits a brick wall if you print to a Word document. Although TMG happily completes its construction of the document file, Word will not open it once it has grown to even a quite modest file size.

 

However by some jiggery pokery I have been able to surmount this problem by printing to html files first. Doing this, four separate files are created, one each for the text proper, endnotes, bibliography and table of contents. But if you need to do any extensive editing then you may not think of html as the most flexible of vehicles to use.

 

The jiggery pokery part is the fact that when you print to an html file, the separate text, endnotes, bibliography and table of contents files are then linked together by hyperlinks. This reduces overall file sizes. Now, even though Word baulks at opening even relatively small doc files, it is happy to import quite large html files. These, when imported, can then be saved in Word format. In this way large Word files can be created (at least up to 80MB if you also save images inside the file) which now Word happily opens and closes at will.

 

Another advantage at least to me although I know others will not necessarily agree is that the four files, once transformed into doc files and their hyperlinks globally changed to reflect the change of file format from htm to doc, now hyperlink to each other. I find this much easier to use. So when you are looking up a reference in the main text, instead of trawling laboriously through the document’s bowels for the endnote, the hyperlink immediately opens up the Endnote file and takes you directly to the particular reference. Clicking on the endnote takes you back to the original text.

 

Although the translation of html to doc files is time consuming and a fast computer really helps, I was very pretty happy with this compromise. Until summer this year, that is, when I hit a new limitation in Word which I think is due to the number of endnotes that it will support (somewhere between 30,000 - 56,000). In the summer, Word stopped fully importing my html files and my happiness stopped.

 

Alternatives: one of the advantages of both the Individual and the Descendancy Narrative Reports is that they fully support endnotes, bibliographies and tables of content as well as exhibits. (Although I cannot at present find any table of contents in my Descendancy Narratives to Word although maybe I am doing something wrong).

 

However I have discovered that Adobe’s pdf file format does not seem to suffer the same restrictions as Word (above) and will hoover up everything thrown at it – except the exhibits. Printing to pdf, like to html, creates files for text, endnotes and bibliography but a table of contents is not generated. Editing pdf files however seems difficult or else I haven’t got the hang of it.

 

Pdf format does have one other advantage over Word: for some reason the option to create a new page for each new person in an Individual Narrative Report for many people works in Adobe Reader but there appears to be another bug because it doesn’t in Word.

 

The limitations of the printer drivers for different word processors are not created by TMG. But for larger projects, these limitations seem to me to provide serious impediments to the printing and externalisation of the one’s research.

 

There is a possible way round the problems above but I have not yet thought how to achieve it. This might be to flag up all the people who are reflected in the set of family-based Descendancy Narratives. Those not flagged are then the remaining group whose details are not reported. This smaller set might then be made the focus for a grouped report of Individual Narratives. This set of dual reports should then represent a full coverage of a project’s contents.

 

How to export them

 

A problem that I did not originally envisage arises from the practical issue of how many pages do you have to print in the above exercise? My most recent pdf attempt contains the Individual Narratives of all people in the project. Creating separate files for text, endnotes and bibliography but lacking any inclusion of exhibits or a table of contents, the file sizes are: text file: 7883 pages, bibliography file: 246 pages; endnote file: 2797 pages – a total of 10,926 pages. It would be significantly larger with the pictures. This is still a serious amount of printing which would stretch a laser printer although it could be printed in duplex. Forget about an inkjet – you might not live long enough to see it finish.

 

An alternative way of exporting these details is through John Cardinal’s Second Site which creates a web-site format. There is probably a way of printing the pages thus generated but I have not explored this. This will show text, exhibits and bibliography but not the all-important endnotes.

 

The exhibits (here, images)

 

The topic of exhibits remains a problem in TMG. It is not possible to print these out fully and in spite of their equal status as markers of events of historical interest, they are not accorded the same level of data recording as other events are through their tags. People have tried different ways of getting more images into their reports but at present TMG does not support witnesses or event/source/repository exhibits in a satisfactory way.

 

Although TMG does provide an Exhibit Log, I would like to see this developed into a more fully fledged Exhibit Manager. This would allow for more formal recording of different aspects of the exhibit (eg: if of images: their content, type of image, photographer, place, date, sort date, witnesses, size and so on). Images could then be sorted on these fields for comparison and grouping.

 

At the same time, the Exhibit Manager could act as the basis for the generation of a paper-based report format attached to and within pre-existing reports. Whilst Wholly Genes would perhaps want to franchise out exhibit manipulation and editing facilities to a third party, I would argue that TMG would be greatly enhanced by the addition of a genealogy-focused album manager which combines both images and their descriptions within their genealogical framework. One output of the Exhibit Manager might be the generation, at the end of an Individual Narrative or Descendancy Narrative report, of an album of images relevant to that report, which is printable, and which can show the research details of each picture to a flexible degree. There are hundreds of album-creating programs available but none of them, as far as I know, link research detail with their image and with their genealogy. The development of such a facility within TMG would I believe put TMG well ahead of the competition and would raise the status of the image as a serious focus of genealogical research.

 

As part of the management of images, I would like to see the Exhibit Manager provide the researcher with facilities for simultaneous comparison of pictures so that details relevant to the determination of date, place or person identification can be better ascertained and edited. Often one is left with pictures of uncertain people taken in uncertain places at uncertain times and only intensive inspection and comparison can help throw light on their identification.

 

I would argue that such an Exhibit Manager would then complete a comprehensive framework committed to outputting valuable research material in a form that can be archived, saved and shared for the future. I have recently discovered that in England the Society of Genealogists no longer wishes to receive research material in program-dependent form; it has become too troublesome and time consuming to manage. Over and above that, there are serious concerns about the length of time different media of electronic data storage will keep their integrity.

 

One of TMG’s core strengths is its emphasis upon serious and well-documented historical research. The absence of a way of completely printing and publishing what must be for many people the work of many years if not a lifetime into an enduring format which is program and computer independent is, I believe, an undermining element of this excellent philosophy.

 

My apologies for the length of this article. I have posted it both on the TMG list and on the Wholly Genes Community web-site as I have no idea who uses which and why.

 

Nick Shelley

[John Cardinal 0]

An alternative way of exporting these details is through John Cardinal’s Second Site which creates a web-site format. There is probably a way of printing the pages thus generated but I have not explored this. This will show text, exhibits and bibliography but not the all-important endnotes.

Nick,

Second Site includes citations and sources. What do you mean by "endnotes", if not citations and/or sources?

[Nick Shelley 0]

Hi John,

 

I'm a little confused as I replied to your message yesterday but it does not seem to shown up; perhaps I did something wrong. What I said was something like ...

 

Mea culpa. I can see now that Second Site does indeed use the full panoply of source and citation referencing. I am new to this excellent and flexible program and can see that there is still much for me to learn - like that for example! My apologies for the error.

 

Nick

[John Cardinal 0]

Nick,

 

No problem. I wanted to make sure (A) that you knew what the program does in terms of sources and citations and ( that there wasn't some issue with sources/citations that I needed to learn.

[Terry Reigel 0]

Nick, some thoughts...

… when I am old and grey, how am I going to pass on all this research for family and future researchers of family history?

.....

It makes sense therefore to prepare Descendancy Narratives (others prefer the Journal format) based upon the main families and branches that one has researched. For me this involves 36 family names and therefore 36 Descendancy Narrative Reports. These can be individually saved and put together within Book Manager and generated in one go.

 

This approach has much to be said for it but it falls short because it does not include one’s research into

 

(i) other families with the same name who may well turn out to be part of the main ancestral tree but who have not yet been connected

 

One solution is create a set of Descendancy reports for them too. You can do this in a single report by using a filter for the "focus person" something like:

 

Surname = [?] AND

Father ID# = 0 AND

Mother ID# = 0 END

 

This finds all "end of line" persons for each branch and creates a series of reports for each line. You may want to start it with:

ID# Does not Equal 123 AND

to exclude your own proven line.

(ii) families closely associated with one of one’s own but who are not direct ancestors but who are intimately connected with them and reveal important aspects of one’s own history

(iii) individuals who appear or reappear in family events (pictures, documents, witnesses) who are either relations but of unknown linkage or are people of family importance

You could run reports for them as well, I suppose. But it's a bit harder to collect all of them.

Alternatively, lacking the genealogical structuring of the Descendancy Narrative but nevertheless capable of providing complete coverage of the subject matter within a TMG project, the Individual Narrative can be applied to all subjects in one report. This is the nearest that TMG comes to a paper backup of its contents.

But you loose the connections between people, unless you either add some sort of chart, or add parents and children to the tags of each person, as been discussed from time to time here and on TMG-L. But in either case, you loose the citations for the relationship tags, and thus in a sense don't actually then have a proven "genealogy." I don't know a good solution for that issue.

Practically easy to set up, the whole-project Individual Narrative quickly hits a brick wall if you print to a Word document. Although TMG happily completes its construction of the document file, Word will not open it once it has grown to even a quite modest file size.

The problem seems to be an undocumented limit on the number of footnotes/endnotes Word can open. You can "solve" the issue by omitting source notes, but that's hardly a workable solution. You can change the endnotes to text and make Word happy, by using Unique endnotes, or by creating the report as a text file with separate Endnote report. But then you can't edit the file in Word and have the notes adjust.

However by some jiggery pokery I have been able to surmount this problem by printing to html files first. Doing this, four separate files are created, one each for the text proper, endnotes, bibliography and table of contents.

 

The jiggery pokery part is the fact that when you print to an html file, the separate text, endnotes, bibliography and table of contents files are then linked together by hyperlinks.

 

What do you do with the resulting files? Seems to me the result is only useful if you keep it as a Word file, rather than print it. But a Word file hardly seems to me like a long-term solution. All the issues with long term storage of electronic media arise. Will the physical media remain intact? Would a reader still be available? Would the data format still be readable?

 

I'd suggest if you think electronic media are accepable, an HTML "site" created by Second Site has more potential to be read in the future than a Word file. And, it's easy to include everyone you mention above, all properly linked.

 

For long-term storage, nothing seems to challenge paper. But the two-dimensional nature of paper reports make it extremely difficult to depict complex relationships of real families and their associates. I can't envison a paper report or set of reports that easily makes that clear. Not to mention the huge number of pages that might be required, as you mention.

[Nick Shelley 0]

Thanks for your thoughts, Terry

 

I like the example below which picks up other families with the same name but uncertain linkage.

 

Can you think of a way of being able to set up a flag for all those people not included in the main 36 Descendancy reports?

 

Whilst my main focus is to find a way to print out my research, Second Site's html 'site' does look like a good electronic option. For fun I set Second Site to show all people and all tags plus any exhibits that I had linked in, and the whole lot came to 1Gb which would fit nicely on to a DVD.

 

Second Site seems so much happier in its handling of image exhibits that it almost tempts me to put more of them into specific tags. So far I have only experimented doing this for one person to see what happens. (It is horrible in Word of course!)

 

One way I have limited the exhibits included in such a report is to preselect, where available, images which typify certain ages or rites of passage, like infant, young person (pre-teenage), teenager, young adult, wedding, middle age, and old age.

 

Nick, some thoughts...

One solution is create a set of Descendancy reports for them too. You can do this in a single report by using a filter for the "focus person" something like:

 

Surname = [?] AND

Father ID# = 0 AND

Mother ID# = 0 END

 

This finds all "end of line" persons for each branch and creates a series of reports for each line. You may want to start it with:

ID# Does not Equal 123 AND

to exclude your own proven line.

 

You could run reports for them as well, I suppose. But it's a bit harder to collect all of them.

 

But you loose the connections between people, unless you either add some sort of chart, or add parents and children to the tags of each person, as been discussed from time to time here and on TMG-L. But in either case, you loose the citations for the relationship tags, and thus in a sense don't actually then have a proven "genealogy." I don't know a good solution for that issue.

 

The problem seems to be an undocumented limit on the number of footnotes/endnotes Word can open. You can "solve" the issue by omitting source notes, but that's hardly a workable solution. You can change the endnotes to text and make Word happy, by using Unique endnotes, or by creating the report as a text file with separate Endnote report. But then you can't edit the file in Word and have the notes adjust.

What do you do with the resulting files? Seems to me the result is only useful if you keep it as a Word file, rather than print it. But a Word file hardly seems to me like a long-term solution. All the issues with long term storage of electronic media arise. Will the physical media remain intact? Would a reader still be available? Would the data format still be readable?

 

I'd suggest if you think electronic media are accepable, an HTML "site" created by Second Site has more potential to be read in the future than a Word file. And, it's easy to include everyone you mention above, all properly linked.

 

Charts

 

When it comes to paper, I agree that there seems no substitute and we are back to a rock and a hard place. However the third element I left out of my message was that of the use of Charts. For me it is these which provide that much needed overview of people's relationship with one another.

 

My problem with charts, other than the fact that my A0 printer has stopped working!, once again lies in the long-life qualities of printer paper, and the inks used, as well as an issue I have not yet resolved - how wide can you print in Windows XP Pro? At the moment my widest family tree is over 80 feet wide (er, that's just over 24 metres).

 

My other issue when it comes to charts is a wider one of which charts have people found most helpful or would find helpful?

 

I have recently purchased Progeny's Genelines because I have needed to see how members of the same and of different family's lives have overlapped in time and this program does achieve this, if in a rather gaudy way.

 

For long-term storage, nothing seems to challenge paper. But the two-dimensional nature of paper reports make it extremely difficult to depict complex relationships of real families and their associates. I can't envison a paper report or set of reports that easily makes that clear. Not to mention the huge number of pages that might be required, as you mention.

 

Nick

[Terry Reigel 0]

Thanks for your thoughts, Terry

You're welcome, Nick.

I like the example below which picks up other families with the same name but uncertain linkage.

 

Can you think of a way of being able to set up a flag for all those people not included in the main 36 Descendancy reports?

Yes, by creating a custom flag and using the Secondary Output to set it for the people who are in the reports, whoever is left, well, isn't. Make the default values N,Y -- N for no, not included, and Y for yes, included, with N being the default value.

 

The hard part might be to mark the 39 starting persons, unless you have already done that. If they are the end of line ancestors of you or another person, you might try a filter of:

 

Is an Ancestor of ID# 123 AND

Father ID# = 0 AND

Mother ID# = 0 END

 

and have the secondary output to change your flag to Y. (I think this will give you both end of line parents if known, but don't think that matters here.)

 

Once you have the end of line persons, use of filter of:

 

YOUR_FLAG = Y

 

and below, under "Then add..." check Descendants.

 

I believe this will result in everyone in the 36 reports being marked Y, and thus everyone not in them being marked N.

 

My problem with charts... once again lies in the long-life qualities of printer paper, and the inks used.

If you print with an inkjet the ink issue is very real. Some of it fades badly in a few years.