Linking your family history to community history Presentation by John Shoring to Brisbane TMG User Group 17 March 2012

 In documenting your family history a number of links can be found to your community for example:  Education;  Government (local, state and federal);  Community service (clubs and other organisations);  Employment; and  Military History;  TMG can create parallel histories. Adding value to your family’s history

 Creating non-persons in your project to collect the community information. Last year Kevin Haley gave a presentation on this topic a copy of the presentation can be found on the TMG Sydney website at  Using the witness function to link the individual to the specific non person created in your project; How (1)

 Modifying some of the standard tags for the non- person like:  Birth  for the creation or establishment of a school; and  Death  for the closure of a school and How (2)

 Adding other miscellaneous tags to:  Explain your family’s involvement like the decline in school enrolments over time; and  Identify milestones like school centenary or if the history is available add the appropriate school principals. How (3)

 So far I have created non persons for:  Schools (where I have identified a significant connection either as a student or through some other involvement with the school like teaching or parent on P&C or school board – in my case more than 5 family members);  Local government authorities – where I have identified a link with family members either as councillors or employees;  Various family run businesses – where I have been able to identify business locations and various other records for the business including advertisements and web pages. Non-Persons in my project (1)

 I am considering using this function:  To link with various clubs and associations i.e. my family has a long connection with various masonic clubs;  Military histories for example I have identified a number of family members attached to the same unit.  Using these non projects may provide a better historic context to what these members actually faced. Non-Persons in my project (2)

 In my project:  Each project is identified by use of the non-person flag set at ‘Y’ for yes. Since non-persons are the exception the default value of the flag is ‘?’ but it should probably be set to no;  Use a simple hierarchy:  All schools are a child of selected Queensland schools; and  Local governments are a child of (Local Government Queensland).  Able to track historic name changes for the non-person; and  Associate people (family members) with the non-person project. Non-Person Projects

 Global Sentence Structures  Apply to all tags of any tag type and are modified in the master tag list  the List of Tag Types Report provides details of global sentence structures  Individual Sentence Structures  Apply to individual tags and are modified in the tag event screen Global and Individual Sentence Structures

 Variables  the letters enclosed in square brackets like [P] and [D]  A full list of variables is set out on Terry’s TMG Tips  Text  The ordinary text in the sentence like “was baptised”  Conditional variables  The codes that control how the sentence will be applied in certain conditions they are contained in “ ”  Formatting Text  Displays how the text appears including fonts, special characters i.e. carriage return [:CR:]  Linking tags using the [+] variable for death and subsequent burial Basis Concepts of Sentence Structures (1)

 Information Displayed  We may not want to display some or all of the data entered against a particular event. This can be controlled by using either:  The [D0], [L0], or [M0];  By using an exclusion marker at the beginning of a field like “-” for person view or at the beginning of a sentence “--” for narrative reports;  Special characters like “/” to display characters used for special purposes in TMG like “[ ]”;  Suppressing end of sentence punctuation by using [:NP:];  Printing in journal reports like [:NoBirthPlaces:] and [:NONE:] or  Sensitivity brackets “{ }” within a field to isolate specific words or phrases which are not printed unless the show sensitive data is checked in the reports option screen. Basis Concepts of Sentence Structures (2)

 In addition to the general concepts the witness variables and witness memo fields apply VariableResultExample VariableResult Basis Concepts of Sentence Structures (3) - Witnesses [W]Current Witness' name, or a substituted pronoun Tom Jones, or He [W+]Current Witness' nameTom Jones [WO]Other Witnesses' name(s)May Jones, Sue Jones, and Fred Jones [WM]The Witness Memo field [WM1]...[WM9]Segments of a split Witness Memo