* Grouping 2 or more trees on same chart

[richard_conradi]

I have built a chart with 500 individuals. I started with a male ancestor who was married. I built up a tree of all their descendants including me. However my ancestor's wife had a brother who married and had many descendants. I wanted to include this tree as well which I was able to do but this means that whenever I adjust or add any new person to one tree I have manually to move the second tree to prevent overlapping boxes. I want to find a way of "grouping" the two trees as if they were one. Is there a way? I have tried to create a chart (diagram) of "everyone" but this looks terrible and is not formatted as I wish. I also wish to group together on my diagram the spouse of a descendant who marries again (after divorce or death) and has children who are not related in any way to the ancestor but nevertheless are indirectly part of "my" family. I can do this in a cumbersome way but again any changes I make to the descendants of the ancestor mean the boxes for the non relatives have to be manually moved. Maybe I am expecting too much?

[AdrianBruce]

It occurs to me that the answer to your first question is probably that the whole thing could be done as a descendancy tree showing the descendants of your starting male ancestor's father-in-law. Assuming I understood it right. His descendants include his daughter - who married your starting male ancestor - and his son, brother to your ancestor's wife. The two trees that you have are the descendants of those two.

Your 3rd tree, the spouse who marries again, however, does seem to me something that can only be done with an everyone or two trees inserted into the same diagram.

In essence, as you suspect, I believe that you are running into the limits of diagrams that are derived from up, down and all-relatives. It's rather like me selecting a whole load of figures in Excel and expecting it to come up with a nice pie-chart while ignoring the fact that I've actually got 16 dimensions to the data.

[tatewise]

Try an All Relatives Diagram with the Spouse who married twice and one of her husbands as the root Family couple.
Note that choosing a Family couple gives a bigger tree than choosing an Individual.
The neat thing about these diagrams is they include not only full ancestor trees but also descendant trees of all siblings and cousins.
You may need to choose another Family couple to get nearest to your ideal tree.
Then a small subsidiary tree may need to be inserted.
Unfortunately, at present there is no way to group trees as you requested.