Family Historian User Group

I have a rather large family tree with a lot of distant relatives and families included. Out of this I just want to print a chart with just my direct descendants and ancestors in it (i.e 2 parents, 4 grandparents etc). Is this possible? Is it also possible to split my existing tree into separate trees,one with direct descendants and ancestors and one with all relatives?

Should have said I am using version 5.

Thanks

When you have selected the person you want as the diagram root (in this case, yourself) you will see four different diagram icons in the main toolbar (just to the right of ‘Media’). The last of these is the All Relatives diagram which includes anyone who is a blood relative of the diagram root and anyone who is a spouse of any of those blood relatives. This is presumably the diagram you are normally viewing.

The first of the diagram icons will produce Ancestors only and the second will produce Descendants only. By default this will also include spouses of descendants, but if you don’t want to include spouses you can remove them by right-clicking in the background of the diagram and selecting Diagram Options, then on the General tab next to Spouse display options select ‘No Spouse info’ from the drop-down list, instead of ‘Spouses in own box’.

The third diagram icon is for Ancestors and Descendants, which sounds like the main requirement you have. Unfortunately this option now also includes siblings of the diagram root as well as ancestors and descendants. If you have any siblings but don’t want them included in the diagram you can hide them (and their spouses/families) by right-clicking on each sibling in turn and selecting ‘Hide’. You can also opt to include the siblings but not their descendants, by unticking 'Auto-dislay root's sibling' branches' in Diagram Options, Main tab. An alternative is to create an Ancestor diagram, then right-click and then use ‘Insert into diagram’ to add a Descendant diagram to it, overlaying the boxes for the Diagram root person.

I recommend having a look at Chapter 3 of the book ‘Getting the Most from Family Historian’ (available from the Help menu) which is an introduction to diagrams. However, note that the description of the Ancestor and Descendant diagram on page 36 is not quite accurate, as it says it is simply the grafting of an Ancestor diagram onto a Descendant diagram. In fact it also includes the root's siblings and their families, as explained above. This means that in fact it is a diagram of Ancestors and Descendants of the root's parents.

You will see from this that it is not necessary to ‘split’ your file in any way in order to produce the different diagram types you want. I hope this helps.