Family Historian User Group

Does anyone else use FH for anything other than their own family tree?
I am in the process of building a tree of the Royal Family to show all their connections.It started in a

small way but I now have nearly 10,000 individuals on it!It just grew and grew and now has French,Spanish,Scottish & Portugese Royalty plus all the aristocracy in between.
I also do tempory trees for instance if I read a book with lots of charachters and relationships so I can remember who is who.
I hope I am not alone in using FH like this but I do sometimes wonder!!
[grin][dancing-banana]

ID:2500

No you are not alone with yout tree of the Royal Family.
I have one with about 120 individuals.
I started it because of my interest, albeit small, to understand who was who and their relationships to each other.
I then used this tree with photos I obtained on line to have a good play with how to link pics etc into the tree.
Can I be sent to the Tower for this?
I'm thinking of starting another one for Winston Churchill/Princess Diana.

Howard

Glad to know I am not alone!I am also putting in pictures now.So good luck with yours and believe me the tree will just grow and grow!![bounce]

I am a fan of the Morland Dynasty books by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and am in the process of putting their convoluted tree onto FH.

I have just taken over the job of managing the records and research for a One Name Society.

Its a bit of a challenge but FH is helping by answering a lot of 'queries'! I have done a Search for Orphans, which in effect sorts the individual records out into unrelated groups. There are 109 unrelated groups!!

Anne

I was given a book about the Guinness family - not so much the famous brewing side but their missionary and clerical cousins. I used FH to produce a tree to help me to work out who was who. It was also useful to pass on to friends to whom I recommended the book.

Robert

I have for some time used the diagram function to generate buttons for use on my site. Additionally I used it to create the icons (Living/Generations) available for download from FHUG.
I have recently set up a site for my local family history group and used the diagram function to generate a site map (See http://rootsweb.com/~nswwfhg/)

John

My husband has a book on the famous (or infamous) New England Lowells which has a family tree in the back. We are trying to figure out if his branch of the Lowells meets up with theirs. I had started to put the family tree into my previous genealogy program but it proved to be too cumbersome.

I should try again with FH.

Note to Rusty: I am impressed! I have only read one volume of the Morland Dynasty (the one set in the Napoleonic Era); most of the Harrod-Eagles books in my collection are her Bill S. mysteries. Entering all the Morland family tree info would be quite a chore -- as I recall there are twenty volumes -- or more.

Jan

When I was a child, I became fascinated with thoroughbred racing, and especially with the horses' pedigrees. (It's a shame -- or perhaps a blessing, who knows? -- that no one introduced me to the concept of doing genealogy at that time, or I would have jumped right in, making 'pedigrees' for everyone in my family.)

So now that it is spring and the horse-racing season is in full swing, I was wondering what might happen if a horse-crazy kid latched on to the idea of using FH to keep a studbook.

Most lineage-linked programs on the market would complain if the father of the children is only four years older than the offspring. [wink]

I also wonder if they could handle a 'crop' of (say) forty offspring per year.

Has anyone tried this with Family Historian?

Obviously any serious breeder would use software that was dedicated to the purpose, but I was curious about how far back it would be before the current stakes winners all had the same ancestors.

Jan

I see no reason why FH can't be applied to horses or to other pedigree animals like dogs.  It doesn't seem to complain with parents being only four years older than the child.  I am not sure on the limits of numbers of offspring and spouses.  I thought I had seen them in the manual, help or FH website, but I can't find them at the moment.  I think they are pretty large numbers.

There are two things you would need to be careful of.  Firstly naming, I know little of pedigree horses, but I don't think they use surnames.  You would need to make sure you enter them with a blank surname.  For instance if a horse was called Ace of Spades, enter it as Ace of Spades //.  If you just enter it without the //, FH will assume Spades is the surname and it will become Ace of /Spades/ and all it's children will default to Spades as a surname so you will end up with names like Ace of Hearts /Spades/ as a child (foal!).

Secondly horse pedigrees will get complicated much quicker than human ones.  If your starting horse has forty children in a year they will presumably have forty spouses.  The following season they may have another forty, some by new spouses and some by a selection of the original spouses.  If you do an all relatives with only a few generation of cousins, it will be very complicated.

To find the most recent common ancestors you would need to use queries, there is one in the downloads to find common ancestors, but you would need to repeat it several times to find what you are looking for.

Since mares are generally listed in race programs as 'name by [sire's name]', I was thinking of putting the 'by sire' information in the surname field as an aid to quick identification.

Custom events could be made for race results, I suppose.

Jan

Have a look at this site and their software which is aimed more at animal pedigrees. It can handle Gedcoms so you could start in FH and switch to Breeders Assistant or Pedigree Assistant if you get stuck into it.

http://www.tenset.co.uk/index.html

Thanks, Jon. I'll check it out.

Jan

As some of you may know, here in the USA we have recently lost one of our Senators, Edward M. Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy. He is one of nine siblings, and has many nieces and nephews and grand-nieces, grand-nephews and grandchildren.

To amuse myself, I started a small file with Ted's parents Joe and Rose (Fitzgerald) Kennedy, the nine siblings, and a few of the children. I poked around on Ancestry a bit, did not come up with any census records for Joe and Rose. (Of course there are many trees for this family on Ancestry already, but I ignored those for all the obvious reasons. I was primarily interested in the living individuals, which Ancestry trees SHOULD not have, so finding information about the living family members in Ancestry trees would only have made me angry.)

Yesterday when I was watching the funeral, I made a list of the kids and grandkids and so on who spoke during the funeral mass. You can guess what happened next. [oops]

Later that evening, I discovered that on Wikipedia, there is a list of all the descendants of Joe and Rose. 'This would be easier to navigate if I had it in a file instead' I thought, so I started putting them all into Family Historian. There was also a small pedigree for Joe Kennedy, so I put that in too.

When I finished, I had 117 names!

(The 117 names include spouses and a few second spouses of spouses e.g. Aristotle Onassis).

So it seems that my personal record for 'how many names have you added to FH in one day' now stands somewhere around 100, since I probably had close to 17 names when I started.

Nothing at all is sourced right now -- my purpose was more of the 'how can one keep track of all the players without a program' variety. But I may go back to the file from time to time to run searches on new collections of data, or as a warm-up exercise before starting my own work.

Usually when Family Historian gives me the warning about a person's lifespan being more than 100 years, it's a mistake, but in the case of Rose Fitzgerald, it wasn't.

Jan

Jan,

You may already know this but the Mac program, Reunion, ships with a sample file showing 5 generations of the Kennedy including short biographical notes, sources and good photos. If you go to the Reunion demo pages or the makers site, http://www.leisterpro.com, I think you can also access much of this on free pages.

Rupert

Ah, I have looked at a couple of different programs and utilities for the Mac, but I don't think I have actually looked at Reunion yet. (My Mac is a Power PC, not Intel, so alas, won't run Family Historian unless I want to experiment with running wine.)

Thanks for the tip.

Jan

OK, I know this will sound weird, but I have a Progressive Rock FH Project.

It started when I was in my 'fed up with Family History' moods, read this thread, and thought 'I wonder if I can replicate the 'Pete Frame Rock Family Tree' format.'

I failed.

However playing about, I've ended up with a tree with a load of records (no pun intended)  under, three main groupings -
Band name  
Members of the band (a varying feast) - as spouse
Albums - as offspring - I've grabbed front cover images from 'Rate Your Music'
(I was going to do songs but I think that pushes the idea into the ridiculous - but again then bands like Anglogard and Transatlantic have covered old Genesis songs - so maybe I should).

I started with the band YES who, if I have it right, have had ten different line ups, some more than once (and at one point four of the 'classic line up' were in one band playing YES songs - but it wasn't called YES). Confused? You will be.

So band names are for example YES1 - spouses are Jon Anderson, Peter Banks, Bill Bruford, Tony Kaye and Chris Squire and offspring are the first two albums plus a BBC release from 1997. YES2, which is where Peter Banks was replaced by Steve Howe etc.

I then worked out and added all albums that, say, Peter Banks or Jon Anderson worked on etc. whether as part of a band or solo. Peter Banks worked with Clive Nolan so I 'married' them and could include Arena, Caamora and Pendragon stuff etc.

It means I should be able to select a person and see all their album work, including cover art, and then seek it out to listen to (if I were so inclined).

As you can imagine, doing a large diagram, with so many interconnections sometimes gives me more ribbons than a may-pole.

Keeps me off the streets I guess


Chris

Chris --

The Rock Family Tree books are some of the best books ever!

May I recommend the program CATraxx to you? It is a shareware package to catalog CDs and MP3s and other music. You can find more details at http://www.fnprg.com/catraxx/ .

CATraxx allows you to specify the lineups of bands by timeframe. One of my 'when I'm retired' projects is to put the data from Rock Family Trees into my CATraxx database.

If you want a machine-searchable version of the Rock Family Trees, where you could pick out a musician and see his career by timeline, as you would in Family Historian, CATraxx could handle it. You wouldn't have the diagramming capabilities of FH, but you've already got the diagrams with the original books.

Just a suggestion. I also use the same developer's programs to catalog my books (BookCAT) and videos (CATVids). A stamp database is also available.

They're all solid programs, and if you buy more than one, a discount is available.

Data can be fetched from CDDB / Gracenote, cover scans can be attached, etc.