Cemetery Report -- with Pictures!

TMG allows the user to add exhibits - photographs, text documents, OLE objects, etc. - in a wide variety of locations.  What you add and where you add it depends upon how you want to use the exhibit.  Are you like me?  Do you love walking through cemeteries photographing tombstones, whether they belong to your family or not?  Do you have thousands of digital tombstone photographs scattered on your hard drive?  They're just waiting for you to figure out what to do with them, aren't they?

• Photographs can be linked in TMG to: People, to Events, to Citations, to Sources, to Repositories, and to Places.
• Linked photographs will appear in reports only if they are linked to  People, to Events, to Citations, or to Sources.
• Therefore, if you want tombstone pictures to appear in a report, do not link them to Repositories or Places.  Of course, you can link them to more than one person and more than one entity.

Not every report type allows the user to print exhibits (photographs).  To help me figure out what report types allow what options, I created this simple chart (PDF file). This chart shows that:

• The Descendant Indented Narrative, the Individual Narrative, and the Journal reports are the only reports that provide all photograph options.
• The Ahnentafel report prints photographs linked to People and Events.  This report is limited in the people it includes, so I seldom use it.
• The Family Group Sheet and Individual Detail reports print only the Primary Person exhibit.  Therefore, unless you link your tombstone photograph to a person and make it the primary image, these two reports won't serve the purpose.

It looks like our cemetery report with tombstone photographs must be one of the three narrative-style reports.  Practice with each one to see what works best for your purposes.  Examples and instructions can be found on our instruction pages, specifically "Cemetery Reports: Including Tombstone Photographs."

Here are some ideas, comments and questions that came up in our discussion.

• How do you enter a tombstone transcription?  Or is a transcription even necessary?
• What about a tombstone that memorializes more than one person?  How should that be handled?
• How do you create a report that shows who is buried next to whom?
• My only cemetery records came from Find-A-Grave.  How should I report them?

Before these questions are discussed more fully, it would be a good idea to practice with a few cemetery reports on your own.  You may come up with some of the answers on your own.