* Individal records page - column for Ahnentafel No?

[Peter Collier]

Might there be a way to get a column containing the Ahnentafel No. to display on the records page for individuals?

I know you can sort ascending/descending using the relationship to root column, but the sort order is alphanumeric, which I'm finding to be a bit of a chocolate teapot! I want to sort for direct ancestors by their degree of relatedness to the file root.

[tatewise]

Yes, use the =AhnentafelNumber(FileRoot(),%INDI%,1) function in the Column Expression.

[Peter Collier]

Bang on as usual, Mike. Thank you.

I'm not hopeful, but could that expression modified in any way so that individuals without an Ahnentafel No. would appear at the end of the list after the direct ancestors with a number? At the moment they appear at the head of the list (I suppose their ATN is evaluated as zero and thus higher than 1). I guess some kind of IF > 0 ... ELSE... kind of thing - can expressions handle that?

To be clear, I'd want the first individual in the list to be the root (1), then ascending order through all the ancestors to whatever the highest numbered direct ancestor might be, and then any remaining unnumbered relatives by whatever the default order for them would be (it appears to be alphabetic by surname at the moment).

[Gowermick]

Peter,
What I did was use the Ahnentafel number (AN), as a custom ID,(with, in my case a prefix of J) for all my direct ancestors.
For all the non direct Ancestors, i.e. descendants of these direct Ancestors, I simply added an alphabetical suffix to the ID of their parent.
e.g. direct Ancestor Fred Smith, with an AN of 2036 has a custom ID of J2036, and his children, who are not direct ancestors, will have a Custom ID of J2036a, J2036b etc. Their children will be J2036aa, J2036ab, J2036ca etc etc
Spouses of direct ancestors have their ID with a suffix of /1 added for 1st marriage, /2 for 2nd marriage etc.
It is a simple scheme, and I keep it up to date as I go. I.e whenever I add a new descendant, I just copy the ID of their parent and add an appropriate suffix and that’s it.

It might sound complicated, but is a lot easier to apply in practise

[tatewise]

Peter, the best Expression I can come up with is:
=NumberIf( AhnentafelNumber(FileRoot(),%INDI%,1) > 0, AhnentafelNumber(FileRoot(),%INDI%,1), 99999 )

They must be numbers, otherwise the AhnentafelNumbers do not sort correctly, so the 'rest' must have a large number.

The order of the 'rest' of the records will depend on however they were sorted beforehand.

[Peter Collier]

Thanks again, Mike. I'll give that a go. 99 999 would be a 17th great-grandparent, so I'm sure that will be more than big enough as a dummy number!

Mick: Good system, I may do something similar myself to sit alongside Mike's solution, but I need something dynamic for this column for those rare occasions when I switch the file root temporarily.