Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Stuart P

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 ... 21
1
CREATE A USEFUL HOURGLASS CHART IN FTM
It's easy to produce an hourglass chart based on one individual, showing all ancestors, descendants, siblings and spouses. However you cannot create a chart based on a married couple showing all of their ancestors and all of their descendants. Here is a way to do this.
Let's say the couple, A & B, have 4 children. Add a 5th child and name it '.' [yes just a full stop]. This child has no gender. Take the 4 real children and disconnect them from their parents using the 'Person' menu. Re-attach them as children of '.'. Now you can create an hourglass chart centred on '.' . In the 'Box & line styles' menu change the border style for Unknown gender to 'None'. Now you have a family tree with all the ancestors and descendants of both A&B, but not their siblings. There is a gap in the descendants line from AB to the 4 children which can be filled in with a little white image file containing a vertical black line. Or, you can draw it in by hand.
Rename the chart to something appropriate. Now you have a lovely Christmas gift for your kids!




2
GENERATING AN EXTENDED FAMILY CHART FROM FTM - SOME TIPS AND TRICKS
The first thing I would suggest is to create a copy of your tree which will be used solely for charting. This allows you to edit facts and text which looks 'clunky' on the chart but is useful when comparing for DNA.
When you first generate a chart you will see that the default fields are Name and Lifespan, and the default font is 6pt Arial. I change the font defaults to 8pt for Facts and 9pt Bold for Name. Chart Title to 26pt Times New Roman. Untick 'Center tree on page'.

In the Box and Line Style dialogue, I change box sizes to 3.2cm wide, with different colour borders for males/females. Duplicate these colour schemes for 'Marked boxes' 1 & 2 but with a suitable fill co;our. Change the Chart Border to 'None'. Untick 'All boxes same size'.

In the Facts to Include dialogue I remove lifespan and put in Birth, Marriage and Death, plus other facts as desired. Untick 'Include private facts' and 'Include blank facts'. In all facts I go into the Fact Options and untick 'Include "in" before place'.

Traditionally you want your tree to have the paternal line on the left, maternal to the right - you can set the home person as someone 2 or 3 generations up on the paternal line to achieve this, always generating the chart from this person.

Global editing: Lets say you have 100 people born in "---, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK". This takes up a lot of space and looks inelegant on the chart. You can go to the 'Edit' tab at top left of the screen - Find & replace ', Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK' with 'Aberdeenshire', or 'ABD' (Google Chapman Codes for UK counties). Check through the chart for mis-spellings and other edits you want.

Page setup: Assuming you don't have a large format printer set up on your computer, it's best to define page size as A4 landscape if the final pdf is going to be printed on 24" paper roll, A4 portrait if it's going to 36". In either case you want to limit your chart to 3 pages high.

The tricky stuff: When you first generate a chart you will see a main body of connected people, but separate little sub-trees which the program has been unable to fit into that main body. Typically, a female spouse may occur twice on the chart - once with her husband and once with her parents and siblings. It is possible to move groups of people on the chart so that the duplicate overlays on the original. A problem is that the two duplicate boxes are not the same size because her marriage is not listed in the wife's family group. To fix this, double-click on the wife to edit her details. Change her shared marriage fact to 'Private'. Create a new unshared fact called 'Marr' and copy the information from 'Marriage". While you are there, also add a new fact called 'Text' - defined as an Individual fact, Text Only; this may come in useful later. Go to the 'Items to include' dialogue and add 'Marr' and 'Text' to the list - unclick the 'Include fact label' in 'Manage Options' for the Text
fact. Make the labels for the 'Marr' fact the same as for 'Marriage' Add 'Marr' and privatise 'Marriage' facts to all the women who are duplicates.
Save the chart, and KEEP SAVING it regularly as you go through subsequent steps. An annoying feature of FTM is that is very easy to accidentally go into an edit mode which results in the chart being re-drawn. If this happens, click the 'Collection' tab top left and select 'Saved charts'.

Click on anyone's box then right-click-->Select All. Use Shift+Right Arrow to move the entire chart creating space to insert all the sub-trees into the appropriate place. Then use Ctrl-leftclick to select the family group which will end up on the left side of the chart and move them there. Starting with highest generations, move the husband and wife to the right side of the man's siblings. Then select the family of the woman, move her to the left of her siblings, then move all of them as a group so that the duplicate entries overlay each other. Continue this process down the generations.

Use of the 'Text' fact: This can be used to add some piece of information which may have been put in Notes. Also, for example there may be a spouse, with parents named, of an ancestor's sibling. It may be there is no way to generate the chart including these parents in one tree. You can delete them from the chart but put in a Text fact saying 'daur. of John Smith & Mary Brown'.

Understanding Saved Charts: Saving a chart locks in the layout of boxes and settings, not the information. When a chart is initially generated, the gap between generations is defined by the tallest box in each generation. This means that if you were to make edits that increased a box height to greater than the height of the biggest box in the generation it is impossible for the Saved Chart to be applied - you would revert back to the initial chart layout. It's a good idea to increase the vertical gaps - right-click on any box-->Select generation and all descendant generations, Use the keyboard down arrow to create more space. There is no way to change other settings without losing all the box moves you have done.

Create your chart: try to make sure that the chart lies within the confines of the 3-page A4 height. Centre the tree on the page. Click on 'Share-->Export to one page pdf.

Hope this was useful.

3
"I need to split mine into at least 2 sections but I don't want to delete everyone on it, but have two versions so I can delete the appropriate people on the two versions."
I think the best way to do this is to disconnect the two spouses forming the roots of your new trees. Then generate an Extended Family Chart for each one of them in turn, ensuring "Include all individuals" is OFF and you have sufficient generations of ancestors and descendants to include everyone. Click on on of the boxes, then Right-click-->Select All.  Then File-->Export-->Selected Individuals. Tidy up by adding the disconnected spouse to each tree.
The Extended Chart with "Include all individuals" ticked is also a good tool to spot errors in your tree -unconnected groups of individuals will show up below the main body.

4
Excel & Dates: Dates are stored in Excel as a number, starting with 1 on 1st Jan 1900. The date is then displayed (not stored) in whichever way you want. If you enter a pre-1900 date then that is simply a piece of text with no numerical value.
Lets say you have a series of pre-1900 dates in column B of your spreadsheet in the form dd-mmm-yyyy starting at Row 2, then you can extract the year by typing, into a new column "Year", the formula "=right(B2,4)" which grabs the rightmost four characters of B2. That formula can be copied downwards to the bottom of the sheet.
For post-1900 dates then the formula would be "=Year(B2)". You can then sort your spreadsheet by Year.
Other Excel date conventions: If I type "1/3" into Excel then the text "01-Mar" appears on my spreadsheet - it assumes that I have typed a day/month. But it is actually the number 43160.00 which is stored - i.e. 1st Mar 2018, 43160 days from the beginning of the 20th Century. If I type "=Now()" I get 31-03-18 21:11 displayed, but 43190.8827 is actually stored, with the time stored as a decimal fraction of the 24-hr day.
The Calendar
Originally the Christian calendar year started on 25th March. Scotland changed to 1st January in 1600, so January, February and most of March 1599 did not exist. England followed suit in 1752, so from 1707 to 1752 the unified country had two different calendars - February 1720 in England would be the same as February 1721 in Scotland, but April 1720 means the same in both. In original records you might find "Old Style" or "New Style" in date references. The famous "11 days" lost from the calendar occurred in both countries in 1752, marking the full adoption of the Gregorian Calendar with its rules for leap years and which most of Europe had been using since 1582.




5
If you sent up you chart in the normal way (do not worry about page overlaps). Then go to 'Share' on the top right and that gives you a drop down, choose 'Export to one page PDF' and its done!!! You can then load it to a memory stick or whatever and take for printing!
Hope this is useful
Gerry
You may find that if your FTM print is quite large then the 'Export to one page PDF' fails. One solution is to install [for free] CutePDF as a printer on your computer. Then you can 'Print' your tree directly to PDF after choosing one of the custom page sizes in the Printer Properties menu - the largest is 3ft x 8ft.
If your chart is larger than that then I think you would have print directly from the FTM program. So, if was to be printed commercially, you would have to install the printer onto a laptop, prepare your print in FTM then connect your laptop to the printer at the shop. Alternatively install FTM at the printshop and copy your file into the Family Tree Maker directory.
Do not allow a printshop to charge you 'by the foot' - remember, a chart is 99% blank space.

6
Scotland / Re: ScotlandsPeople (New website now live).
« on: Wednesday 26 April 17 11:31 BST (UK)  »
Regarding the statutory marriage search, which does now work with name of spouse: Example - search for Alexander Cockburn marrying Edith Milton, I get one result 1951 in Aberdeen South. If I then remove the name Edith Milton and ask for a marriage of Alexander Cockburn in 1951 in Aberdeen, I find that Edith has 2 names Milton and Elphinstone. If I then search for marriages  between the surnames Elphinstone and Milton I get Edith Milton marrying Francis Mitchel Elphinstone in 1927 in St Machar. Males can also have more than one surname indexed, but not in this example.

7
Scotland / Re: ScotlandsPeople (New website now live).
« on: Friday 14 April 17 00:11 BST (UK)  »
Add me to the "not impressed by the searches" list please.

Margaret Green - b. 11.05.1915, but other than her parents and siblings I know nothing about her. Ancestry (yes, I know) has a Margaret Green on record as marrying a George Imrie in 1845 so I thought it might be an idea to look for the death of a Margaret Imrie with Green as the other surname on SP. In the past that may have worked to my advantage, though it might have taken a few credits to find the correct death. Now? It's all speculation and probably a lot more expensive.
Obviously they didn't think about those of us who live nowhere near Scotland!
If you go to FamilySearch.org and plug in George Imrie and Margaret Green as parents, you see that they have their children at Crail in Fife. Search ScP for deaths of Margaret Imrie in Fife and the one that looks closest died in 1902 aged 86. Change the search - just Margaret [no surname] dying in Carnbee aged 86. Result - Margaret Imrie and Margaret Green both as the 3rd death of the year. Use this search technique in ScP to find the full list of surnames for any individual - the maximum I have seen is five separate surnames.

8
I have been working on a tree which was mostly input online at Ancestry which had many instances of multiple marriages between individuals, marriage to their own parent, more than one set of biological parents, etc., etc. Here are some useful tips:
1: Give each individual and each marriage a unique ID number in FTM using Tools-->Options-->References.
2: When merging individuals start as high up the tree as possible. Don't merge 2 people who have got parents with different Person IDs. You might want to temporarily rename them sometimes, e.g. John 1 Smith father of James 1 Smith; John 2  Smith father of James 2 Smith. Merge the two Johns then the two James's.
3: Use the Publish menu. The Extended Family Chart with "Include all individuals" will show you (bottom left of the chart) people and families on the tree which have been disconnected from the main body, accidentally or otherwise. The Data Errors Report will list impossible relationships, e.g. born more than 1yr. after death of father.
4: Multiple Parents: It is difficult to identify within FTM all those who have more than one set of biological parents. So, Export your file to Gedcom (.ged) format. This produces a text file which can be opened in Word, Notepad, etc. and can also be imported into an Excel spreadsheet as one column of data. The important thing here is the code "FAMC". The ged file lists all facts about an individual sequentially, so any time that "FAMC" occurs on consecutive rows it means they have 2 sets of parents. Similarly with "FAMS" for spouses. Having identified the individuals you want you can use the Person-->Merge or Person-->Attach/Detach in FTM as appropriate.

Hope this helps a few people.

9
Aberdeenshire / Re: Rev Joseph Smith Birse Census
« on: Monday 30 May 16 16:35 BST (UK)  »
Joseph Smith's Lists of Inhabitants were included in the Kirk Session records for Birse. The records should be at the National Archives in Edinburgh and some local archives have on-line access, e.g. the Mitchell Library in Glasgow & Aberdeen city and county archives. A photocopied and indexed volume of the List is in the library of the Aberdeen & North East Scotland FHS.
An example entry from 1791/2: Forest of Birse - Shaw Catanach 4 m. to Jean Birss 4, Cha. Catanach 2, John Catanach 1, Jean Catanach 1, Jas Catanach 1, Archd. Catanach 1.
4 refers to under 40, 2 is under 20, 1 is under 10.

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 ... 21