agthorn

Same boat as you Dave, still on v7 and apparently delinquent in watching the WG emails since I have not been doing a lot with genealogy the last 18 months ... my loss. Interested in now moving my data off of TMG I guess now. Drat, more pain. William

I have a family line where I had Augusta married to Jane, and they were parents, and grandparents on down. Now I find out that it's great aunt Augusta married to James!! I have to switch the gender on these two and it does not seem to be a very easy thing to do without totally loosing the children from the parents first. Would love to get some advise on the best way to accomplish this. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. William Silverthorn A.K.A 'AgThorn' San Diego, CA

Sorry for responding so late. I am personally not familiar with the specifics of the GEDCOM spec, but I do get her point about the child sorting. Even TMG has child numbering as an option to prevent the very problem she is mentioning from occuring. If TMG does child sequencing, why would it not do marriage sequencing or at least entertain this as an option in its next release? It would seem that anything to make the purchasers of TMG happy with the software they purchased would seem to be a worthy goal for the creators of this package.

I recently had to have my laptop re-imaged, but I had my TMG and GS software, as well as my data, on a companion drive. This did not prevent my software from not functioning though. I did reinstall TMG again with minor problems (required a whole new folder, not recognizing my userid in the old folder for some reason, but no big deal). I am not able to accomplish the same with GenSmarts however. While reinstalling the TMG code, I said yes to reinstalling the GenSmart code from my same TMG CD. Since I had to do it for TMG, I assumed (possibly wrongly) that I should also do it for GenSmart. My problem now is that I am in 'trial mode' and I don't see any way to tell it my registration key ... also, different than TMG, the registration key is not easily found in the software on my deskside computer. Is this something that I need to get sent to me again if I can't find my email? Anyway, any assist appreciated. William San Diego

Well, wasn't expecting a response this quick from World Connect. I forwarded the quote from the link you gave me: "According to the GEDCOM specs, it's the responsiblity of the receiving software to correctly sequence tags by date if that's desired. Apparently WorldConnect doesn't do that." Here the 'response' from World Connect: ------------ Hi William, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that is not quite so. Date sequencing is an option. Ideally, it should be an option in the program exporting the GEDCOM -- for several reasons: 1) Suppose there is no date entry for one or both marriages. The creator of the database/GEDCOM should be able to sort/arrange the marriages for GEDCOM export in the correct order in his/her program. 2) Children are another problem. Suppose a couple has 5 children born between 1810 and 1820. One of the 5 was born in 1812. A date sequence sort order would result in child 1 b 1810/1820 child 2 b 1810/1820 child 3 b 1810/1820 child 4 b 1810/1820 Elizabeth b 1812 which is obviously incorrect. To solve your immediate problem, in your genealogy program, unlink spouses (and any children of that spouse), then relink the spouses in the correct marriage order. Export a new GEDCOM for upload. World Connect may have a date sort option available at some time in the future, but it will not be a default for the reasons mentioned above. Pat ------------ So, I am left to do the above 'surgery' to my data until either the GEDCOM creator or reader take the time and make it easier for us genealogists!!! I imagine I have a lot more 2 marriage principles that are not displaying correctly due to this lack of proper handling on either end. FYI - this is where I am. Would be great if TMG would put the above in their items to look into. William

Thanks Barb ... I knew this question had to have been asked once before ... I will go yell at World Connect!!!

I recently updated my GEDCOM data on WorldConnect and in so doing I inspected a new 2nd marriage entry that I had added to see how it was displaying. http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/i...rn&id=I5172 I have not inspected the GEDCOM output from TMG exactly yet, to determine fully that the problem is partly WorldConnects read on the data, but I am guessing that the GEDCOM created is not sequencing the marriages correctly. By listing the first marriage second, it obviously does not report well. Is there a way to control this, since apparently the date of the marriages (one being earlier than the other) is not sufficient to do so. I know we have sibling numbering but I don't see any sort of marriage numbering ability in TMG. Any and all guidance on this appreciated. William Silverthorn

Sounds like this update of your tool may be the only way I can 'purge' this short place field, which is keeping a good number of redundant placenames in my file. I will look for it or if there is a way to get a note when its available, please let me know and I will signup to be so notified. Thanks again for your assist.

In further analysis, it appears that many of my dupes have a short name created, versus there being any real trailing space problem. This 'short name' is slightly off the short name in the duplicate record. Not sure how these 'short names' are generated, some of them come up with Twp Unk, versus City Unk, they all seem to have appended Co after the county name. These variances, created by perhaps the different place styles that I did initially have after a recent merge, are what is causing this duplicate placename problem. So the good news is that I have narrowed down my problem to a pretty precise definition, i.e. 'Short place:' variances. The bad news is I don't know how to 'regenerate' these short places, or blank them, in a batch process so that I can reoptimize this file. Where exactly is the 'short place' utilized anyway? William

Sorry to take so long to respond. I downloaded this tool, and I thank you for pointing me to it. However, when it looks at my database it cannot find any more than one style. Which makes sense since I eliminated all other styles while I started this process. Not finding more than a single style, the tool could not continue. I went back and looked at a couple of my double entries and manually verified that there were no trailing spaces in one dupe and then optimized. This apparently worked and eliminated this single duplicate. Since some time went by, I did another and re-optimized and it also worked. So, it appears that my problem is that the dupes are caused by hidden spaces making them slightly different. The TMG tool, or at least the method you showed me to use it, does not seem to assist me here in this refined definition of the problem. So, in net, how does one get rid of trailing spaces in fields in the place names table or any table? William

Not sure if this is related to this thread or not. I just entered my DNA 12 marker test data. For one, I don't see it anywhere as a tag but it is there as I re-click on the DNA button on the screen. Not sure what it is doing but it is there. However, I am not certain but it appears now that two of my 3 son's are now showing up with their name tags as 'brown color'. These are twin son's if that means anything, but my other son and daughter are not colored anything special, nor is my father. But apparently my father's sister is .... anyone explain this? I can not say for certain that this was caused by the DNA data input but I do not remember it being this way before. And what exactly does the DNA data input do since it is not a shown tag?

Understand. however, if it is 'different styles' that are causing the otherwise similar placenames from being 'optimized' out, is there any way to 'automate the making of the 'styles' the same so an optimize will work? Quite painful to have to do each one by one.

I will do that ... I thought I did already and I could not see any difference. Let's say that I do find 'differences in style' however that will be recognized, is there any way to 'globally'' change the style then so optimization will then work?

Would like to jump in here since I am also now having a problem with the place name file. I am at the current release (6.07) and just finished doing a merge of two projects. In cleaning up the place name file, as I have often done in the past, optimize does not seem to be working. I still have a lot of redundant, same name, entries in the place name file. My problem is different than the person who started this thread, as I am not specifically looking for 'unused' placenames. I am looking for 'optimize' to do what it has for me until this merge, i.e. to see that 2 (or more) entries are identical and to remove the redundant entries, relinking all tags to the remaining placename record. Someone please tell me where I am failing here. I just sent in a trouble ticket to support on this. Not the end of the world, but not sure why it no longer works. William