Family Historian User Group

I have a husband and wife with seven children and this is the start of the decendant chart. On the chart, the two eldest children are on the left of the parents and the rest are on the right. Between them is a /huge/ gap caused by the tree of the descendants from the marriage of the second child.

It is the equivalent of over 50 'people boxes' wide and, as it is an area of research where I use ancestral sources, there is a lot of file saving and opening where the tree is reopened.

As I result I'm finding I'm spending a huge amount of time just scrolling right to left and back again across this gap.

Apart from manually closing the expansion buttons after each file load, is there a more effective way of apporaching this problem?

Many thanks

It may be worth looking at Saved Diagrams - which do save a layout.

If you are prepared to break the alignment of generations, you can use a "box and bar" move (the icon top right with four arrows at 90º to each other) to drag the "prolific parents" off-spring line down to a bit of clear space and allow the other cousins to close up.

You could do as David suggests and use the 'box and bar' move to drag the large branch down so that others can close in above it. This could be in addition to closing some of the expansion buttons.

However, having done that you need to use Diagram > Save Diagram As > Family Historian Chart to preserve the layout. The Chart can then be opened next time from Charts > Saved Charts. (Just saving the diagram, or saving it as a diagram type will NOT preserve the layout.)

For large families like that, perhaps you would be better working directly from the focus window instead of from the diagram. In the focus window, the family is neatly listed under the parents.
Personally, I see no advantage of using diagrams to navigate/edit families rather than the focus window, and I rarely use them, but that’s just the way I work

Thanks all for the suggestions. I'll definitely try the Save Diagram route

This need to deal with major gaps where descendant families have lots of children is why my Descendant trees are set to just show target plus one generation ("Generations Down" = 2). Then I open up branches as required - but I'm not familiar with whether this might be as much hard work for the OP, but in the opposite direction of opening, rather than closing branches.

What do you call those charts where the bottom families have their children arranged in a vertical list?

This would at the cost of vertical scrolling reduce horizontal scrolling