Hello: My first post: I have been using TMG for perhaps 10 years, but not as an expert.
I'm doing some research into apprenticeships in the feltmaker trade in Bristol, England. These records start in 1535 and continue for about 400 years. Simply, a master takes an apprentice, perhaps, several apprentices. Some of these apprentices eventually go into trade and have apprentices themselves. Gradually, a tree of apprenticeship relationships develops.
The theory under test is whether apprenticeship trees lead to other business relationships which stay within a limited number of ' apprenticeship families'. These trees would be, in fact, the business networks, the trade's lifeblood. When partnerships are made, for instance, are they more likely to be constructed between tradesmen of the same tree even if they are only distant 'cousins'?
I decided to test whether I could use TMG to build apprenticeship trees with the master entered as the 'father' and his apprentices as 'sons', continuing the process as the 'sons' became 'fathers' to new apprentices. This is the 'unnatural act'. No other normal genealoical information is required except the year of apprenticeship. It is the basic relationship that is important, not the circumtances.
I soon got into difficulties. Individual apprentices were often 'turned over'. This means that the master died or left work or whatever and a new master was found. Two sequential masters for one apprentice is not unusual, nor three; the maximum I have found is six. How to give a son multiple masters - fathers? How best to identify the first master, second master, etc. I did this latter by adjusting the tag to, say, father master 1, 2 ... Then I couldn't get a decent descendant chart to display (this being one of the preferred outputs of the exercise). I got over this by 'marrying' each new masters for an apprentice to the first master. This worked for a small input, but when I got to the second generation, the chart was horrible with connecting lines going everywhere. A further complication is that, for instance, the second master may have himself been apprentice to the first master. And, just so it isn't easy, the first master was often the real father of the apprentice. Could this be indicated?
Is there anybody out there who finds this interesting and might have some ideas? At the moment, I am thinking that my 'unnatural act' is stretching TMG into places it just doesn't want to go.
Thank you
Chris Heal
