* How do I use a fact of witness role teacher to link people and then diagram

[donromard]

Hi new to FH using V7 on a trial.

I'm trying to do a non-standard genealogy of people whose only relationship is of teacher- student. I want to be able to print out a family tree diagram showing the historical link between generations of teachers that had students.

Based upon reading some help and some forum posts I started to use the "Facts" and "Witness" capabilities. "Fact" is "Education". "Role" is "Teacher" linked to the person that was the teacher as a "Witness".

Note: a student may have more than one teacher. I want all teachers of a student to also display.

Note: not all students will have a relationship of teacher to other future students. Thus, that branch of the tree would end

Need to be able to do this before making decision to purchase!

Thanks,
Don

[tatewise]

Welcome to the FHUG Don.

It sounds like your requirement is rather unusual and might not be possible with any genealogy products.

Firstly, it is not possible to produce family tree diagrams for Fact Witness relationships.
So that technique will not work.

Family tree diagrams require parent-child relationships to produce the familiar generations of ancestors/descendants.
So I think the only way forward is to link teachers and students as if they are single parents and children or vice versa.

If I understand your description then one or more teachers can teach a student and a student can then be a teacher of other students and so on. You want a diagram to show that chain of teacher - student relationships.
You have already said that a student can have multiple teachers, but can a teacher also have multiple students?
It is that many-to-many relationship that may prove difficult in a standard family tree diagram.
So considering any one person, they could have been taught by many teachers, and also could have taught many students.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood.

[NickWalker]

I'm not sure how well this would work in practice (and whether diagrams could show it in the way you wish) but in FH, a parent (teacher) can have multiple children (students). And a child (student) can have multiple parents (teachers) so technically these teacher-student relationships could be modelled in that way (with teachers as single parents as Mike suggested)

[AdrianBruce]

... technically these teacher-student relationships could be modelled in that way (with teachers as single parents as Mike suggested)

Hugely difficult to envisage this, but I'm trying to think of the worst case / normal scenarios and I have this gut feeling that, although one could map the student / teacher relationship onto child / parent for the purposes solely of diagramming, the resultant diagrams would be constrained by a basic structure of families. Whereas student / teacher relationships might be better drawn with lines all over the place. Not because lines all over the place are in any sense better but because lines all over the place aren't constrained to the structure of a family tree, so it might be possible to arrange them in a more readable manner without that constraint.

That being so, I'd have thought some sort of general diagramming tool would give that flexibility.

[tatewise]

I think Nick and Adrian have reiterated what I said initially in reply.

As an experiment, I have created a dummy Project with some Teacher - Student multiple relationships.
The screenshot is of an Everyone Diagram because that is the only way to show multiple 'teachers/parents'.

Teacher-Student.png (20.25 KiB) Viewed 629 times

John SMITH is the focus of this diagram and he has three Students: Jane, Peter & Alfred
John has three Teachers: Tom, Mike & Beryl
Tom was taught by Ken who also taught Brian

It is feasible to manually adjust the diagram so that the three John SMITH boxes coincide and have three 'teachers/parents'.
However, that becomes impossible if Mike or Beryl have multiple 'students/children'.

[donromard]

Just as I was about to submit the below, I see your latest post. Looks very similar to what I came up with. Sad to hear about the one challenge you mentioned. I'll have to try that and see if I can reconcile the diagram

======

Thanks for all the input.

I guess I can still use witness facts to document teacher role and dates.

I had tried to use parent child relationships upon my first attempts. Tried using stepfather as parent. That didn't work the way I hoped. Tried to use non-relative. Not sure that worked too well either.

For the one individual that had 3 teachers I ended up with a diagram with 2 trees side by side. Which isn't what I'm looking for. I'm really looking for a tree style diagram. As Adrian pointed out there could be lots more diagram lines that would have to be adjusted to print out nicely.

I could use something like Visio to draw the diagram. I was an Information Technology (IT) architect, so I can draw complex diagrams But it's not automatic, and doesn't store dates, pictures, other things that family tree programs do. Thus my attempt at this effort.

I've attached a screen shot of the focus screen and the tree diagram I did draft.

Notice that Seiyu Oyata has 3 parents, but the focus screen only displays 2 of the male parents. Yet in the facts and witness screens it knows he has 3.

Appreciate all the help.

Best,
Don

[tatewise]

In the Focus Window to the left of UHUGUSHUKU there are tiny up/down black arrows.
They let you choose which 'teacher/parents' to show.

Your data is a little inconsistent because you have made UHUGUSHUKU and WAKINAGURI a family partnership, which in a real genealogy tree would be the father & mother of the child.
I think to be consistent you need to have only single-parent 'families' as shown in my diagram.

I don't understand how you expect to achieve a tree-style diagram when there are so many possible multiple relationships.
Imagine if OYATA and ODO both had multiple teachers and also multiple students and some were shared.
i.e. Imagine that some of those teachers taught both of them and that they both taught some of the same students.
e.g. Give ODO another separate teacher, and give ODO the students TAKAMINE and ROMARO and another separate student.
Now the diagram gets more complex and the more relationships the more it becomes a network rather than a family tree.

[donromard]

Thanks again. I'm new with the program so there's the normal learning curve I'm dealing with here too.

Got it with the arrows. Understand the way those 3 teachers should be setup now. I can fix that.

Thanks for all the concerns too, and I understand. I've done this in years past on a piece of paper, poster sized, in pencil. But trying to maintain that is a ton of work, which is part of the reason I stopped.

I'm going to try a bit more now that I understand a path forward and see how ugly it may get.

I also have my actual family trees I want to work on for both my Paternal and Maternal sides. A cousin did the Maternal side of our family on Ancestry. Thus, I know I can get a GEDCOM file from him. Possibly for the Paternal as well from another distant cousin.

But this use case for the teacher-student tree I knew would be more of a challenge.

If I can at least make it worth my time for this use case, then I'll purchase, as it will then serve multiple purposes. It's also not an expensive investment.

Appreciate the help and guidance.

Best,
Don

[tatewise]

OK, I'll let you experiment for a while.

FYI: With the Everyone Diagram open there are a number of 'tricks & tips' I would suggest...

1) Double-click on any person's box to open their Property Box where a child/student or parent/teacher can be added.
To add a parent/teacher, click the Show Parents Window icon in the toolbar, and if a parent/teacher already exists click the add set link in the bottom right corner.

2) For any person's box you can drag the cursor down from the box to add a new child/student box.

3) For any person's box that has no parent/teacher you can drag the cursor up from the box to add a new parent/teacher box.

4) To move boxes and trees around, click the + Move icon in the toolbar or use Diagram > Enable Moving/Resizing to open the Movement Control Box. Then you can adjust the Box & Bar linkage between boxes or move an entire Tree, etc.

[donromard]

Mike,

I've been able to clean up the relationships as you described. By using the tool more, and following your advice, also reading the Quick start guide, I've made enough progress to answer my initial question. Yes I can do this.

Here's an updated diagram. By closing some of the tree descendants I can display only what I'm interested in diagramming.

Question - what is the yellow curved line significance? What is it called?

I'll be purchasing the program today

Thanks,
Don

[tatewise]

I'm glad you found FH suitable.

The yellow lines are called coloured ribbons that link boxes displaying the same person in different family groups.

See the Diagram > Options > General tab, Check for duplicates tick box and associated Options...
Click the Help button on both the General tab and Duplicate Options dialogue for a more detailed explanation.