David, When I mention TMG's filtering ability, I mean its ability to find things in your data, such as a citation to a particular source, a person who has 3 marriages, and so on. Its external searches send you to the actual web site for whichever database you've selected. I don't use automatic merges because I'd rather review the data and make sure I've extracted all the information from it while entering it in my database, so it doesn't do that but that doesn't matter to me. It has 4 major sites it searches automatically: Ancestry.com, familysearch.org, rootsweb.com and GenealogyPortal.com. It will search those for all name variations in one step, and you can individually tune the different site searches before you send them off. It brings up a new web page for each site for each name searched, so you can end up with a pile of browser windows running. As I mentioned earlier, you can add your own sites to its list but you would visit them manually. Individuals are individuals. They can have any number of names, and you can define "name styles" , where you can exactly define how they are displayed. Each name has up to 7 different fields. Marriage is just an event and TMG makes few assumptions about what it means regarding names, children, etc. GenSmarts can be used with TMG in two ways. One is stand-alone, the same way you use it with FTM. The other way is from within TMG. It operates on the current individual only, and produces two different types of result. One is a list of suggestions that you can automatically add to the task list for the person (one thing that I haven't yet mentioned about TMG is that it has a research log where you can track research tasks -- a todo list with some project management capabilities), and the other is online lookups of the suggestions it makes. Unfortunately, you can't mark things as Found or Ignore from within TMG -- it's mainly designed for research support. But this is a new feature in the current version and I expect it will mature according to customer suggestions. I believe for TMG I have paid full price once, and paid for two upgrades since spring 2002. They seem to do a new version about every 1 1/2 to 2 years. All of the intermediate versions (I think 16 on the last version) have been free, and all of the pay versions have been significant steps with major new features. They are in fact slow to release new versions, slower than many of their customers would like. Current price is $59 for download, $79.95 for shipment which includes a printed User Guide. The user guide is included electronically in both. There is a Silver version with fewer features for $34 download/$39.95 shipped (no indexes or TOC, no HTML output and some charting options missing, for instance.) www.whollygenes.com At 12:59 PM 6/30/2005, you wrote: >One grip[e] I have about the new FTM2005's web search function is that it will only search on the specific individual you click on(the star and world icon below their names) and it will only search for that particular individual, you can then easily merge the info with a click of the button, and yes the citation source is very inadequate if not non existent on the merge function. I used to think that was important but I don't think so now. I'm a lot pickier about the data I allow into my database and I want to review it thoroughly, evaluate the source, etc. before I include it. >I am not too keen on manually transferring my photos already in FTM to TMG though. But if I want to use the specific event photo placement, I would probably have to co that anyway. Photos do come over automatically; I checked. > How are the report generating capabilities and book writing functions of TMG compared to FTM? Umm. Complicated subject. Short answer: I think FTM's are prettier but you can't do as much with them. TMG has most of the report types; there are a couple of types of graphs, especially, that are notably missing or deficient -- it's why I continue to have FTM around (that, and sharing with cousins.) All the most common ones are there, including formats for various genealogical journals, Family Group Sheets, and so on. You can run a report over any subset of your data you can describe to the program (using filters). You can save any report configuration under a separate name, sort of like FTM's views. On most reports, except for those with a fixed format, you can select what events are reported (by event type, which applies to all the people in the report.) You can produce citations or not for almost *every* report (maybe some graphs excepted), not just a certain type like in TMG, where they come out whether you want them or not. Graphical reports -- ancestor trees and the like -- are rendered in a separate, integrated program. It's a full fledged graphical editor and you have a lot of flexibility to tweak the charts manually, but not a lot of control over what is initially produced. For narrative reports, every event in TMG can have a sentence, and there is a wide selection of variables to use in sentences (such as using "he" or "she" instead of the full name.) You can also control fonts, indentation, etc. In addition, most events can have witnesses -- this feature is like Roots III and was designed for those users. Each witness can be assigned to a role, and each role can have a custom sentence, all under your control. The downside is, I think some people spend more time playing with their sentences than messing with their data. Again, you can fully select the event types reported. There is also a "sort date" you can use to make the events come out in your preferred order -- it doesn't show, it's just used for sorting. All that said, unless you work on the sentences a lot, it still sounds computer written. I have to say, there are some people who have beautiful prose, automatically generated from TMG. For example, this is an individual narrative directly out of my TMG file: Electa CONKLIN was born circa 1843 at New York. Electa CONKLIN married David WALDRON, son of Joseph WALDRON and Rebecca DOANE, on 28 Feb 1860 at Olmsted County, Minnesota. She and David WALDRON appeared on the census of 8 Jun 1860 at Cascade Township, Olmsted County, Minnesota. She and David WALDRON appeared on the census of 29 Jun 1870 at Cascade Township, Olmsted County, Minnesota. She and David WALDRON appeared on the census of 10 Jun 1880 at Cascade Township, Olmsted County, Minnesota. She and David WALDRON had three daughters and three sons. Electa CONKLIN died on 14 Jun 1882 at Olmsted County, Minnesota. Another point buried in the above: any event can have witnesses, so you can attach all of the people in a household to a census event and it will show for each person, or attach the sponsors to a baptism with appropriate sentences. You edit narratives three ways. 1) Edit the data, 2) edit the sentences, either globally or for each event, or 3) send the document to a word processor and edit it there. You do have to regenerate the report after making any changes in the data, of course. TMG is also clumsy about indexes and tables of content -- you have to do some special fiddling, and they're only produced if output is to a word processor, but it can at least generate a facsimile and put the codes into the text for you. Also, with regard to duplicate familial lines, some reports and charts have an option to truncate that when it's found. You can suppress individual data items (they don't print) at two levels: excluded data and sensitive data. For instance, I exclude the county name when it's the same as the city name. I also globally exclude the sentences for my Married Names, so the people appear in indexes but no sentence appears in their narrative ("so and so's married name was WATSON"). You can turn the excluded info on for any report when wanted. Sensitive data display can also be turned on, but it requires a separate step. I use sensitive data for certain illnesses, etc. You can export any subset of your data you can describe (via filters) to GEDCOM, which is how you get the data to any other genealogy program including FTM, with full control of what's exported. You can print reports to text, HTML, PDF, Word, Wordperfect and a long, long list of word processors or RTF. There's a format called WRK that I think might be a spreadsheet, but in any case Excel or Quattro Pro can read RTF. With regard to web pages: you *can* create a web site using just TMG. However, there's a companion program called Second Site that's tuned to TMG and does a really nice job. Fully customizable without knowing too much about HTML, and can be uploaded to anywhere you like, not just a proprietary website. All of my web sites (see my web page in my signature) were created with Second Site. (Just to bring this slightly back on topic, my Cayugans are the Waldron and Teets lines under Stewart.) One more thing, regarding Legacy. I found a deal-breaker in Legacy yesterday: Every child must have two parents. That causes me a big, big problem. As you suggested, I'm copying the Cayuga list for everyone's benefit. I believe I covered all your points, but I trimmed the included text. Again, if you have more questions, feel free to ask. You might also like to visit the TMG forums at the Wholly Genes website; there is also a very active TMG mailing list at Rootsweb. Barbara Barbara Zanzig Kirkland, WA, USA [email protected] http://www.isomedia.com/homes/hertz/ "You must be the change you want to see in the world." -- Mahatma Gandhi ¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,