This is the untabbed Tag Entry screen, the format I prefer. If you want to specify witness order, however, you must use the tabbed Tag Entry screen. The format you use is determined by File --> Preferences --> Data Entry --> Check (or uncheck) "Use Tabbed version of Tag entry".

• Enter the census event date. You have two choices: the date the enumerator visited the household or the official census enumeration date. I use the former date. Although all information was supposed to be entered as of the official date, that wasn't always the case. I like having both dates available. The official date is easily found, but I won't know the visitation date if I don't record it.
• Enter the place. I use abbreviations, but I think it's more correct to write out the state, the word "County", etc.
• The green camera icon shows that an exhibit is attached to this event.
• Head of household is the principal. A name variation may be used in place of the primary name.

• The memo field contains a complete abstract of the household enumeration, line by line.
• In order to produce a report of census households in dwelling number order, that information must be present as the first item in some field. I use the memo field. The number is enclosed in curly brackets { }, or sensitivity brackets, so it doesn't appear in a standard report.
• My memo does not appear in the body of a narrative report. I may choose to have it appear in a footnote or an endnote.

• The citation is your link from a statement of fact to the source containing the evidence that was your basis for that statement of fact.
• The Citation Detail contains information necessary to find evidence pertaining to this one event in the cited source. This may be a page number, a document title and date, or other identifying characteristic. It appears in reports in your footnotes as defined by the Source Category Template.
• The Citation Detail may be split in up to nine segments: [CD1], [CD2], . . . [CD9]. Each part is separated by two vertical lines, ||, a symbol that resides on my keyboard above the back slash, \. It's best to omit spaces before and after these separators. You will note that I use [CD1] for the name of the head of household and [CD2] includes all other small identifiers: town name, post office name, city ward, city precinct, enumeration district, page number, line number, dwelling number, family number. Many users assign a separate split citation detail for each of the above. Assigning separate values increases your flexibility in reordering the units or in omitting some, but it also increases complexity in adding data. I'm a lazy person at heart.
• How many times have you looked in a census index and felt that the page numbers in the index did not correlate to those in the census? Most censuses have at least two page numbers: a page number entered by the enumerator and a page number written or stamped at the Bureau of the Census. Occasionally, a census page has both of the latter. Add to this the fact that some of the online census images at Heritage Quest use their own numbers to access each image and you will see the problems your readers will incur if you don't include all the requisite page numbers in your citation. The correct format should be something like this: p. 176 [stamped 668] [online 334]. I'm lazy and omit the words "stamped" and "online", although I do have an information note to explain the interpretation of the bracketed page numbers.
• Elizabeth Shown Mills does not abbreviate words such as township, page, dwelling, or Enumeration District in her book, Evidence: Citation and Analysis . . .. I like to save time in data entry and space in the data base, so I do abbreviate these. Also, they are abbreviated in most publications. I feel that a word processor's "Find and Replace" feature will allow me to reformat these easily as necessary.
• The Citation Memo is a new feature in TMG ver. 6.0. Think of it as a Citation Detail when formatting your Source Category Template. It can be defined as [CM], or split in up to nine segments: [CM1], [CM2], etc. It's a new feature, so I haven't used it much. I've redefined my Census Source Template to include a citation memo, if present, at the end of the standard citation. Memos include information on my analysis of the evidence relative to the statement of fact being documented. (An illustration will appear later in these pages.)
• [CD] and [CD1] are synonymous; [CM] and [CM1] are synonymous.
• Ah, the wonders of the surety levels! Many users and excellent researchers simply leave these blank. Note that interesting reports may be created by specifying only events documented by a certain surety level or higher. This feature is a very personal one. I explain my rationalization on the image to the left.

• The step-by-step process for Adding a Witness is presented separately. This is a discussion of the witness screen for a census event. All members of the household are added as witnesses, or present, in the household enumeration.
• There are many complicated systems for creating Census Roles and elaborate Census Sentences. Check out some of the links from The Great Census Debate to view what other people have done. Because I exclude my census sentences from all reports, I don't worry about this.
• To exclude an event sentence, preface it with a hyphen, -.
• The Witness Memo is a new feature in TMG ver. 6.0 and I'm still experimenting with it.
• You have the option to create a Name-Variation tag for each witness that allows you to specify how their name appears in the source. This must be done from the relevant Person Screen; it can't be done from the Witness screen.

• The usual census exhibit would be a scanned image of the census page. The step-by-step procedure will be shown in a later update. (We covered this in the January meeting.)
• Although I sometimes include these scanned images in a web report, I haven't done this in printed reports. I link scanned census images to the event for my convenience only.