TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 1999-10 > 0938941660


From: "John Cardinal" <>
Subject: TMG-L: Married Names/TMG Utility
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 05:07:40 -0400


Some people have expressed dissatisfaction with the way that my TMG Utility
creates married-name events for married women. As a result, I am going to
change the way the feature works so that it only includes the married
surname in the event.

I have been told that this will allow the "Suppress married names" feature
to work properly without changing the way the name appears in the picklist.
I have been so busy at my real job that I have not had time to verify this
myself, but I will before I make the change.

As a result, you may want to wait for the next version before using the
utility to add married names. You shouldn't have to wait very long--a week
or two at most.

And, in self-defense... :-)

First, when I began the development of this feature, I put the surname in
the event, and nothing else. It didn't work properly--the names were not
included in the picklist. After experimenting with a bunch of changes,
including adding the givenname, etc., to the event, I finally got it to
work. I believe that the problem was that TMG has to be told to re-index to
get the picklist to show the new name events, but I never went back and
re-tested with surname-only events. I'll know for sure real soon.

Second, I *did not* intend this feature to create name events that would be
included with reports. Bulk changes like this do not represent good
genealogical practice. The feature was intended to produce non-printing name
events for use with the picklist. This helps in the case where you come
across "Mrs. Blahblahblah" in a source and you want to quickly locate
everyone in your DB who might possibly be that woman.

Unfortunately, I did not adequately explain how I use it! I created a custom
event, NAME-PICK. I set the default sentence for NAME-PICK to "--". Then I
used my utility to create married names, and chose NAME-PICK as the event to
create. This approach excludes the automatically created names from reports.

I'll send another message when the utility has been updated.

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