* Import of custom TMG Marriage Tags not becoming Family facts

[MartinR]

Hi, I'm still slowly working through the import of a TMG (8.08) project, dealing with an unfortunate number of custom TMG tags. One of these tags is a "Marr-???" tag intended to represent a "possible" marriage event. This tag is defined on TMG as

Tag Group: Marriage
GEDCOM export: 1 EVEN 2 TYPE Marr-???

where the normal TMG Marriage Tag definition has

Tag Group: Marriage
GEDCOM export: Tag: MARR

Not all of the Marr-??? tags have two principals cited, but for those that do, TMG presents them as spouses (on its Family and Tree views) and in particular, exports them to GEDCOM with family relationship records (i.e. with FAMS and associated @nnn@ FAM stuff).

Now I know that the FH rules are ...

Every Tag with 2 Principal Persons as spouses/partners becomes a Family Fact (Event/Attribute)
Every Tag with 2 Principal Persons not spouses/partners becomes an Individual Fact of 1st with 2nd as Witness

and when I import these tags into FH, they seem to be being processed according to the second rule (i.e. as Individual+Witness facts). Since I would like these tags to result in spouse/partner relationships on FH, I know I'm going to have to rework something.

So here's the question. Both of the above rules presuppose the determination of whether two persons ARE spouses/partners or not. TMG exported GEDCOM appears to contain that determination in the FAM entries, but FH appears not to use that. Given that partner relationships can exist WITHOUT marriage (and hence WITHOUT a MARR Tag), do we know what information FH is using to make the above determination?

Martin R

[tatewise]

Martin, your analysis is correct.
FH should treat any couple simply linked by a Family (FAM) record as 2 Principal Persons as spouses/partners.
That is how FH usually treats any Family couple. There is no need for a MARRiage Event.

See Importing from TMG - Family event vs single event (18925) where three other users have the same problem as you.

Two of them have reported the problem to Calico Pie but no feedback is forthcoming.

The threads harmonizing TMG9 tag types with FH6 fact types (16492) and Family Facts (16616) confirm that FH v6 did import TMG Custom Facts with 2 Principal Persons as spouses/partners as FH Family Facts with a red bullet.

[MartinR]

Now that you mention it, I did pilot this migration last year on V6.2, at which time my notes on that activity suggest that the Marr-??? TMG tags were indeed correctly mapping to Individual or Family FH facts as appropriate. I have been assuming that my notes were incorrect or out-of-date for some reason, but apparently not after all. After that initial pilot, I paused to wait for V7 to arrive and "settle down".

I have now just recommenced this activity with the intent of running it through to completion. In scanning back through the forums, somehow I overlooked the posting you referenced. That indeed seems to relate to the problem I'm encountering.

However, since I have now frozen my TMG8 database, I'd like to see the migration through to completion sooner rather than later, so am inclined to find a way of achieving the desired end result with what I now have.

To that end, what bemuses me at the moment is why a TMG couple (FAM) without a Marr-??? tag maps to a FH couple, but with a Marr-??? tag doesn't. Is this universally the case? And what happens if I create the TMG couple first before adding the Marr-??? tag. Time to experiment ...

[tatewise]

Are you sure about your last paragraph?
Any TMG couple (FAM) should become an FH couple (FAM) regardless of what Facts are associated with them.
If they are shown as Subject and Spouse in the Family view in TMG then they should be similarly shown in their FH Property Box as Spouses. Whether they have a standard Marriage Event, or a custom fact, or no Family facts at all should not matter.

However, if in TMG they simply share a custom Marr-??? fact but are not spouses in the Family view, then FH will treat them as two unrelated Principals and assign the fact to one and make the other a Fact Witness.

Maybe you need to either contact the other three users who are having the same problem via FHUG or report the problem to Calico Pie again via http://www.calico-pie.com/osticket/open.php pointing to your evidence and here that it worked as expected in FH v6.2 but is not working correctly in FH v7.0.

[MartinR]

I believe so, but I want to do some more work to verify that and also determine how and in what circumstances it occurs. This is why I originally asked if it was known how FH determines if two persons are a couple. I pointed out then that TMG presents them as a couple on its Family and Tree views AND exports them to GEDCOM along with corresponding FAM records.

My suspicion is that because the Marr-??? tag is in TMG Tag Group: Marriage, TMG goes on to create the coupling for them, but in a manner that FH does not spot. This behaviour would be unique to tags in the TMG Marriage Tag Group.

Hopefully, I can create a small TMG/FH test-case which illustrates this.

[tatewise]

FH relies entirely on the FAM record entries to form spouse/partnership couples as per the GEDCOM specification.
Nothing else will cause FH to form spouse/partnership couples.
However, that is not the focus of the problem.
In FH v6.2 any facts shared by a FAM spouse/partnership couple became a Family Fact with a red bullet.
In FH v7.0 those same shared facts do NOT become a Family Fact if they are custom facts as opposed to standard Family Events such as Engagement, Marriage, Divorce, etc.

[tatewise]

I've noticed that you mention exporting TMG to GEDCOM several times.
I hope that is just experimental and you actually import TMG to FH using the Project direct import and not GEDCOM.

[MartinR]

Well, there seems to be something that causes FH to NOT form a spouse/partnership coupling for some TMG couplings that DO manifest themselves as FAM entries if I do a TMG GEDCOM export. THAT was the problem I was trying to focus on, because it seemed to me that if FH wasn't creating the coupling then there was no way I could expect FH to produce associated Family Facts for Marr-??? or similar tags.

So I've just run a small TMG/FH test-case ...

* I created a clone of the Marriage Tag, labelled as Marr-???, with GEDCOM definition 1 EVEN 2 Marr-??? (TMG seems to hold this internally as "Marriage1").
* I then created two unrelated individuals - John CoupleA and Mary CoupleA.
* I then added a Marr-??? tag to John citing both individuals as Principals. This seemed to be enough to cause TMG to couple the individuals as spouses/partners.
* I then imported the project into FH (using FH direct import).

The screenshots below summarise my observations. The resultant FH Focus Window and Property Box details are consistent with the details on the Records Window, i.e. no spousal relationship shown for either person. I'll raise this with Calico Pie.

TMG couple Family View & GEDCOM

TestMarr1-09.jpg (138.41 KiB) Viewed 2931 times

Direct import into FH

TestMarr1-10.jpg (33.54 KiB) Viewed 2931 times

Resultant FH Records Window details

TestMarr1-14.jpg (96.84 KiB) Viewed 2931 times

[tatewise]

Excellent, Martin!
That is really strange because if the GEDCOM were imported to FH the couple would be partners with a custom Family fact.
Perhaps that Subject ~ Spouse coupling in the TMG database is different from specifically defining them as a family couple?
Hopefully, with your detailed report Calico Pie can fix it.

[MartinR]

I've played around a bit more with TMG. There seems to be essentially only two ways of creating a "coupling" - either by Add Person and specifying wife or husband - which automatically creates a Standard Marriage Tag - or by creating a TMG Marriage Group tag which cites them both as Principals. It's possible to change the Tag Types (staying within the Marriage Group) after creating them, and I also tried deleting the Marriage tag after adding a Marr-??? Tag. Also, I can make one or the other "Primary". The right (or perhaps wrong) combination of actions at one stage left me with a couple with just one tag that was a NON-primary Marriage tag. This gave me a TMG Person View and TMG exported GEDCOM with NO family relationships apparent whatsoever, which when imported to FH displayed as a Family Record - the exact opposite of the current problem! At that point, I decided enough is enough ...

Further investigation of the reported problem reveals that the problem does not occur for all Marr-??? couplings, why, I have not figured out. I also have another custom TMG Marriage tag - "Pairing" - which I used for common law and unmarried relationships - and this exhibits the same behaviour. The Tag/Fact label "Pairing" does not seem ideal, but I thought it was probably better than "Coupling" - more suitable suggestions would be welcome.