<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"> On 10/26/2010 3:05 PM, Katherine Pickering Antonova wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:AANLkTikP9hYmBgEFmhw=tvd2OwVK0-AbHbYUTovm2XEY@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Dear genealogists, I'm hoping you can help me to select the best genealogical software for my rather specialized purpose. I'm a historian, writing a microhistory based on a Russian gentry family of the mid-nineteenth century. I'm looking for software that will help me to collate several different kinds of information into one easily navigated family tree. I will need to be able to print reports of selections from the trees that look nice enough for my publisher to use as a reference (the publisher will have their own people draw the final tree, but I need to give them the info in a clear way). But I also want to use it for my reference. <snip></pre> </blockquote> -------------------------------------------- Kate: The Master Genealogist (TMG) is probably the most powerful, most flexible, and most customizable genealogical software. As such, it requires decision making by the user. For this reason, some users find there is a "steep learning curve." Others take to it like a duck to water, delighted by its capability. There is often more than one way to do something. Most TMG users take advantage of only such features as they have need for, gradually learning more features, and do not necessarily need to learn the whole program to be productive. There is a great deal of support available, not only from the company, Wholly Genes, but from other users on the TMG List <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/other/Software/TMG.html"><http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/other/Software/TMG.html></a>, in the TMG online Forum, in user-written books, on user-maintained how-to Web sites, and in face-to-face TMG users groups. In TMG you can have one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships of people, events, and sources. Some TMG users have very large projects with many thousands of people, and some have much intermarried families. TMG has a powerful Associates feature. One person can have as many candidate parents, step-parents, adoptive parents, etc., as you wish in TMG. A person in a data set is linked to one or more parents individually as persons, unlike most other genealogical software which requires a child to be linked to the marriage event of parents. Births out of wedlock are a piece of cake in TMG. TMG has user-customizable name styles, so you are not stuck with just the standard American name format. You could set up a Russian Name Style and a Patronymic Name Style. Each person in the database can have as many different name variants as you wish, a variant for every event if needed. You could refer to someone in a sentence by his given name and patronymic if you wished, according to Russian custom, or even by his epithet. Source templates can be customized to fit whatever style you are using. Apparently you want a genealogical database, but you want only graphic-oriented output from it for your book (not paragraphs, footnotes/endnotes, etc.). Is that correct? TMG has a utility that provides drop charts which can be combined to make a huge wall chart, including optional tiny photos/portraits of individuals. A two-dimensional graphic output of much intermarried families that will fit on book pages may be difficult to get from any program, unless you break up the output into little chunks, which is easy to do in TMG. (There is at least one genealogical program which has three-dimensional output which may be suitable for an ebook. Three dimensions could display more complex intermarriages than two dimensions do.) If you need Cyrillic fonts, look at programs which support Unicode, which very few genealogical programs do. TMG does not support Unicode, but images of signatures or images of Cyrillic print can be incorporated into TMG output. There is an add-on utility for TMG called Second Site by John Cardinal, with which users build genealogical Web sites or output to CDs, including the sources and biographies. You might want such a Web site or CD as an adjunct to your book. For what purpose do you want to have more than one computer involved? If more than one person is doing data entry in TMG, the data can be imported into the master computer and then duplicate people seamlessly merged into a single data set in TMG. TMG has a backup method. If you just want to give other persons all or part of your TMG data to peruse, that may best be done by sharing output from the Second Site utility and by mailing/emailing.graphic charts you have already prepared in TMG. This protects your electronic master data. Hope this helps. --Ida Skarson McCormick, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:idamc@seanet.com">idamc@seanet.com</a>, Seattle A long-time user of TMG (not associated with Wholly Genes) </body> </html>