Family Historian User Group

I know this subject has come up before. When you get cousins marrying, the ancestor (and other diagrams) show repeated individuals and families. I have now got this; I find I am descended from one distant ancestor through four different routes. Also the number of generations up/down is not the same in each route. This leads to very confusing diagrams.

I know the advice is to turn off repeated branches but this loses the connections.

There is a wish list item for this but it is not heavily voted for. Maybe that is because it doesn't seem important unless you have encountered it.

Because I cannot view these interconnections satisfactlorily I find that for the first time I am disappointed in FH. Maybe I am expecting too much. This is obviously a complicated area to program.
I have very limited experience with other genealogy programs. Do any of them handle this area better than FH? Can we expect Version 3 of FH to handle this better?

ID:1136

Yes, I have the same problem many times in my rather large tree.  Branches diverge and then come back together; people marry their cousins or son's sister-in-laws, etc; two brothers marry two girls who are each other's sister; and so on.  It is quite common and most unsatisfactory that you get duplicate sections of the tree.  These things are very interesting parts of a tree, and, like you, I want to see the correct structure on the diagram.

There are a few other things I am rather frustrated by which do not seem to be too popular on the wish lists: like, I want, for example to do an ancestor diagram, but to expand in one or two select areas from an ancestor to his/her descendents, to show a particular link.  In other words, sometimes one wants something more than just ancestors, or just descendents, or just all relatives, and it would be good to expand any parcticular branch at will.

I would also very much like to have more flexibility in reports by, for example, having the ability to format notes and to override the amount or size of photos for any particular relative.  Some images I have are photos and some are documents - the documents need to be really big to see the writing, but this then makes the photos too big, and the report becomes enormous and cumbersome.

I'd also like to have a plug-in which would give me a 'link-chain' from any relation to any other relation in my entire GEDCOM.

Have you had any thoughts about these things?  The frustrating thing is that all these wishes do not seem to figure too highly on the wish-list.

Otherwise, I love the programme, and have had hours (if not weeks!) playing on it, to the frustration of my family!

Philip Wilson

Hello Philip,
Thanks for your comments. I agree that those parts of a family tree with cross connections are the most interesting and it is a pity that they cannot be properly shown.

Your other wish for a particular type of ancestor/descendent diagram to show the family along a particular link is also of interest to me. I know what you mean; you want to see how A is descended from B but also showing the immediate family of the ancestors along that link. Have you added that to the Wish List?

So far I have made limited use of photographs but am happy enough with the way FH handles them. However I use documents in a different way to you. If it is something like a certificate I extract the information and enter that into the record, citing the certificate as the source. With 'wordy' type documents such as a will or a biographical note I have found somewhere, I scan them in, convert to text, check against the original and then incorporate it as a note.

Gerry,

Thanks for your reply, and it's good to find someone else thinking in some of the same ways!

With regard to photos and documents, I have loads of autograph old letters, records of military service, ordination documents, a couple of DSO's etc. etc. where what is important to me is the document itself, rather than merely the information it contains: thus I want to incorporate it into a report which I convert to a .pdf to send to a relative or interested party.  I like the document photos of a reasonable size, but if the documents themselves come up the same size you just can't read them! Just a minor irritation this, though.

Dealing with the other things would make a lot of difference.  By the way, on the all relatives diagram, do you find it frustrating that there is just so much empty space there that a vast area is required for the diagram, and such a small proportion of it can be seen on screen at any one time.  I think the problem is that the amount of 'stripes' per generation is fixed, regardless of how many of these 'stripes' are empty.  I would have thought they could quite easily devise a means of only showing stripes which were populated.

Best wishes,

Philip

Quote>>I think the problem is that the amount of 'stripes' per generation is fixed, regardless of how many of these 'stripes' are empty. I would have thought they could quite easily devise a means of only showing stripes which were populated. /Quote

Have you checked out the features in the next realease of FH available in the new year. (See the note on the home page)

I think this is one of the features that has been improved