Family Historian User Group

Good morning again. I have a number of queries, but in the interest of clarity, I plan to address only 1 at a time. My style when asking for assistance is to be as succinct as possible, honing in on just the one important (to me) question. I don't mind how wide ranging any advice is though.

I am seeking advice on converting my custom census tags from TMG.

I have 1 census tag for each UK census year, 1851-1911. Each tag is exactly the same except for the date which I have embedded in the custom sentence. I have 'conditions' that allow for 2 parents, 1 male parent, 1 female parent, 1 child of a specific gender, and more than 1 child. The parent roles are used in the Principal fields, the child roles in the witness field.

I also have a witness role for anybody in the house who is (1) in my database and (2) anything other than a child of the Principal(s). I use the witness memo to record the relationship individually.

My sentence is - [:CR:]In the census taken on the night of 30th March 1851, [SG] was the head of the household <|and [POF] was his wife>. The address was [L]. <[M].> <Their children [RF:with par +] were living with them><His children [RF:with fath +] were living with him><, [M2]>[:CR:]

A sample sentence of a child - [:CR:]In the census taken on the night of 30th March 1851 [SG] was the head of the household <|and [POF] was his wife>. The address was [L]. <[M].> <Their son [RF:with par] was living with them><His son [RF:with fath] was living with him><, [M2]>[:CR:].

Other iterations with minor changes for female and multiple offsrping.

My witness sentence is - [:CR:][W] appeared on the census taken on the night of 30th March 1851, at [L], in the household of [P] <and [PO]><, [WM]><[M0]>[:CR:].

My question is - should I be rewriting my TMG sentences to something that is convertible at the time of import, or should I be doing the import, then rewriting my FH sentences after the fact.. I am not (yet) asking for details on HOW to do this, I just want advice, hopefully from someone who has already worked through a similar issue, on what angle to tackle this from.

As I have a lot of these tags in use, and the data they present within reports is very informative, I don't mind how much effort I have to make to get an acceptable result out of my conversion. I would like to retain in some form or another the 'picture of the family on census night' that I currently get. A simple statement that this person was located 'here' is not enough. I am though, more than happy to accept any rewording of the result.

An example of the output - In the census taken on the night of 30th March 1851, Elizabetj was the wife of the head of the household, William. The address was Freethorpe, Norfolk, England. Their children Henry and Harriett were living with them, along with a 7 week old daughter of a daughter, Eliza Youngs. As she is only 7 weeks it is safe to assume she is Harriet's.

If the answer is that the 'witness' plug in will assist me, could someone point me to any detailed user documentation please.

I have no real preference for either option, except to say I am very familiar with TMG processes, but I clearly see that I need to learn as much about FH as I already know about TMG. This exercise, should it be within FH, will be a great learning opportunity.

Thanks for your attention - Shirley

Have you looked in the Knowledgebase at KnowledgeBase just search for TMG there are several articles.

I would suggest that this one is a good one to start with https://www.family-historian.co.uk/help ... hecks.html

Thanks for the prompt reply, Valkrider (I love the name).

I have accessed the knowledge base, and it was the fact I felt like I was swimming in treacle that prompted my request for advice. I am hoping someone who has already done something similar can tell me which way they tackled it (changes made within TMG before, or in FH after). I think I could make better sense of the contents of the KB, if I could approach it with a rudimentary plan.

I understand that my inclusion of my sentences in my post makes it appear that I want someone to tell me step by step, but that is not the case. Just some general advice from a fellow TMG refugee is all I am asking for. I don't doubt I will need more assistance once I start the actual work, but I always try to ask specific, targeted, questions.

I learned TMG BEFORE I had any data, by setting myself to record Q Victoria's family. Finding out I had made some wrong decisions during that process, and having to start over, had no impact. This time around I have 25 years worth of irreplaceable research. I did consider doing something similar to learn the FH ropes, but to be honest I think I can work out the recording and the report writing, and eventually even the custom sentence process. It is the conversion of custom tags, before I have come to grips with the FH codes and processes that has me needing some hand holding.

SHIRLEY

Hello Shirley.
I am not a TMG migrant and I'm sure such migrants will offer advice.

In the meantime, the following postings may be of interest, especially for facts with 2 Principals.
Importing from TMG - Family event vs single event (18925)
TMG witness import (18890)
V7 Import from TMG has error in Birth Fact sentence (19313)

Also, in FH there are many advantages in using the standard GEDCOM Census event instead of your custom events as explained in Recording from a Census Record.

May I suggest you compose a small sample project in TMG using your sentence templates and import it into FH to see how they are translated into FH sentences. That will let you focus on aspects of the translation that are unsatisfactory and may need fixing in TMG beforehand or in FH afterwards.

I used similar UK census tags in TMG and looking at my data and they seemed to have transferred over in a sensible fashion. Recently migrated from TMG v6, via v9 using the import feature into FH7. You might want to tweak things once you are in FH but I wouldn't think it is worth redoing them before inport.

I hope that helps.

Thanks Calline and Tatewise. I like that Idea of creating a small project to test with. I will now concentrate upon converting first, tweaking later. Please consider this query closed