It’s been a while since i wrote last, so here is a list of the items that i have been working on:
* The Master Genealogist - So i took a look at the beta version of TMG v 8 and i wasn’t impressed. I’m not impressed with the product or the outlook of this company and whilst the new version now appears to be working with Win7 64 bit, it’s taken years to reach this point. There is not enough in the new version for me to justify buying it..I can now export reports to Word..big deal, it should have been there a long time ago. The platform and architecture for this program looks like something off the ark…Unless there is a major overhaul, i.e. complete code re-write from the ground up, i’ll give it a few years before it’s dead in the water. Which is a shame as i have been using TMG since v 4.
My new genealogly program is RootsMagic (RM4). Is there some pain associated with this change? You bet – there is a ton of things that need to be addressed in a TMG > RM4 move. The first question was start from scratch or convert! My TMG database had close to 4,500 persons and associated events – not insignificant. The time that I have these days to work on my genealogy is limited to almost non-existant. I gave it a try and after getting through about 20 people..manually adding everyone, re-sourcing, etc. I had enough. I settled on the conversion route.
Whilst converting existing data appears to be an easy way out, there are data points that won’t export from TMG or conversely, RootsMagic handles data fields differently to TMG. Here’s a list of the some of the area’s that i needed to work on (or continue to work on):
- Witnessed events – These details are not included in the TMG gedcom export
- Address and Place details are handled differently between TMG and RootsMagic
- Some event types need to be created
- Sources need to be reviewed and re-evaluated
I started by reviewing the Gedcom file produced by TMG, some 90,000 rows and created an automated way to deal with the Address and Place issue. That saved me a ton of time and helped in cleaning up some of the inconsistencies. Once the data was imported into RM4, i had to work through the error log to see what wasn’t imported. There were a few items associated with ancestor and descendant interest flags that needed to be removed along with some source issues.
At the moment, i have been going through various families and even re-created the Morris family document using RM4 – see here.
Another consequence of changing is that RM4 produces a slightly different Gedcom file which changes the way that data is presented in TNG (The Next Generation of sitebuilding). I will need to customize the templates before my next site update.
