Terry's TMG Tips

Creating Flowing Narratives

This page updated 29 Jun 2013

Version note: Applies to TMG 8 & 9

TMG creates workable narrative reports "out of the box" – that is, using the default settings. But it offers tools to create narratives that flow as if hand written, well... because they are.

I know that when I finally publish "the book" on my research I'll want to further edit the text in a word processor. But in the meantime, I find I frequently send sections of my research to distant cousins and other interested in some branch. And I enjoy "publishing" sections as works in progress on my website using Second Site. To make these interim publications read well enough to be interesting to those who receive them, I take several steps to create narratives I consider readable straight out of TMG. They include:

• Customize some of the Sentence Structures in the standard Tag Types, including the addition of custom Roles in some cases. Modifying Sentence Structures is described in my article Modifying Tag Sentence Structures. Using Roles is described in my articles on Using Roles.
• Create custom Tag Types to better report data I find on a recurring basis. Some examples are described in my article on Customizing Your Tags.
• Modify the local Sentences of some individual Tags (both standard and custom types) to better fit the specific case and improve readability of the narrative text. Use of local Sentences is also described in my article Modifying Tag Sentence Structures.
• Use Sentence Variables in Memos to create customized flow of the narrative for specific cases.
• Use Sort Dates to arrange narrative in logical, rather than strictly chronological, order.
• Break the text into logical paragraphs, either by adding line break codes to local Sentences or by use of custom "New Paragraph" versions of common Tag Types.

Examples of some of these techniques are discussed in the various sections mentioned above. What follows is an illustration of how these techniques are combined to create a flowing narrative for an individual.

The Result

I have provided an example of the Journal output for one of my Dad's uncles in my article Why TMG? as an illustration of TMG's power to create flowing narratives. Here is that example, which is unedited output from a Journal report:

How It Was Done

For those interested in attempting this sort of customization, the following table shows the Tag used to produce each part of the text, and how they were customized to produce this narrative. I don't claim the methods I used are the best way, or even a particularly good way, to record this information. In fact, in some cases the methods used are the result of my evolving technique, and I might use different methods if starting fresh now. Nevertheless, they do illustrate some methods for managing the flow of a narrative.

Some comments and observations on the methods illustrated:

• I selected the "BMDB in a separate paragraph" option on the Miscellaneous tab of the report Options, which is why those events are all described in the first paragraph, rather than in order of their sort dates.
• I have customized many standard Tag Types, include the Birth, Marriage, and Death tags shown here, by adding the <[M]> variable at the end of the sentence. This allows me to include various notes about those events, such as the bride's father officiating at their marriage.
• I used sort dates to group some Tags by subject, rather than placing them in straight chronological order.
• I seldom use Roles other than the Default Principal and Witness roles; reserving them for cases where they allow me to do things that would be more difficult or impossible without them.
• I sometimes break a series of related events into separate tags, but sometimes find it simpler to simply enter a significant amount of text into the Memo of a single tag. The decision to do one or the other is clearly subjective, considering the complexity of the details I'm trying to record, how related they are to one another, and whether separate parts come from different sources.
• I break long narratives like this one into logical paragraphs, with one of two methods:

1. Add Carriage Return and Tab codes - [:CR:] and [:TAB:] - to the beginning of the local Sentence of the tag that is to start the new paragraph. For example, see the 1900 census tag above.

2. Create custom versions of common Tag Types which have those codes in their Sentences, and substitute them for the "regular" versions. For example, see the "AnecdoteNP" tag above.

• I include reference to other participants in events by entering them a Witnesses, then referring to them:

1. By creating default Sentences for Tag Types that refer to other participants. See for example the c. 1892 Moved tag which refers to the child's parents.

2. By adding variables referring to them in local Sentences. See for example the 06 Jan 1931 Living tag, in which I've added the variable [RF:Witness] to the local Sentence to refer to his granddaughter.

3. By including variables referring to them in the Memos text. For example the 1910 Census tag has a Memo of "living next to her brother [RF:Witness], and his family" to refer to her brother living next door.

I don't know that any one of these techniques is better than the others. I just use which ever one seems convenient, in part being influenced by the technique I was favoring at the time I created the Tag Type.

• The rather complex census tags are explained more fully in my article on an Expanded Census Tag.

Further considerations for producing a "professional-grade" narrative article, including the use of introductory and concluding paragraphs, see my article on Producing a “Publishable” Article.

Hopefully these examples suggests how you might create more satisfactory narrative output of your data. Clearly it requires some effort beyond simply using default settings. But to me, the whole point of family history research is to create something that can be shared with others. It seems to me that sharing is thwarted when family members find the results too boring to read, so I think the extra effort is worthwhile.

Copyright 2000- by Terry Reigel