* Position of proxy boxes

[JohnLiddle]

I recently generated an All Relatives diagram for my father and noticed that where proxy boxes occur, they are always positioned at the leftmost end of the group of siblings to which they belong, rather than in their correct date order.

Since the stated aim of proxy boxes is to enhance the diagram such that "If an ancestor has one or more siblings, they can help to make it clear where the ancestor fits in amongst his siblings" (quote from FH Help), this must either me being stupid and making an inappropriate chart option selection, or a bug.

In fact, now I look more closely, the siblings are not in date order either - what am I doing wrong?

I attach a snip to show this.

Any and all advice gratefully received.

[johnmorrisoniom]

Use <Tools> reorder out of sequence data. to correct the order throughout your file.

[JohnLiddle]

Thank you John Morrison - simple when you know how!

But what possible reason can there be for not putting data in date order as default?

[tatewise]

It is that way because some users like to arrange their data in different orders.

By default, new items of data, whether adding Records, Facts, Spouses, or Children are usually added last after their sibling items.

In the All tab, the Spouses tab, and Children pane there are up/down arrows that the allow their order to be manually edited.

If before you corrected them, you had looked at the Children pane for those DALE siblings, they would be listed in the same order as your Diagram, which was probably the order you entered them orginally.
On the cog menu top right of Property Box there is Sort Family & Events in Date Order that just affects that Individual.

In some cases, by altering the order, the Diagram can look neater even though it means the siblings are not in chronological order.

FH offers all that flexibility, but Date order is the normal preference, which is why there are various commands to obtain that arrangement.

[LornaCraig]

what possible reason can there be for not putting data in date order as default?

Did you move to FH from TMG? Another TMG user had a similar issue recently with outline descendants reports. See TMG Descendant Indented Chart (12163). I assume TMG re-orders data automatically.

In FH the records will be displayed in the order in which they were created/entered into the file, unless you inserted them in the correct position within a family at the time. For example if you use diagram-based editing, you can use the 'drag and drop' method to place the new child's box in the right place in the family when you first create the record. Otherwise, you'll need to use tools> re-order out of sequence data every so often.

Incidentally, if you have a family where you know the order of the children but you don't have birth dates for all of them, the 're-order' tool won't help, but you can still change the order in the Property box of one of the parents, by using the up/down arrows either on the main tab in the section showing the children, or on the All tab.

[JohnLiddle]

Thanks to Mike and Lorna for their responses - yes this was a direct import from TMG, which as Lorna observes, sorts tags (facts) into date order automatically, with the additional flexibility of a sort date to force the precise sequence you desire for tags which share a common date.