Blended Chart

[apdonnell67 0]

I don’t see a way to generate a chart for a “his, her, their” set of descendents. Is there any way to use a focus group to serve as the basis for a chart?

 

Is there a way to force one of the chart options to use a focus group, rather than the usual “focus person”?

 

I realize I can use the “focus group” to generate the narrative for everyone in the focus group, but I can't figure out how to chart the same info.

 

Thanks

[Terry Reigel 0]

You are using a Descendants Box Chart? It will only show the descendants of one person, so you cannot automatically show the descendents of two people who have descendants who are not shared.

 

You can, however, create separate charts, then copy and paste them together to get a chart like you describe.

 

It might also be possible to temporarily give the two of them a common parent, make a descendant chart for that common parent, then edit that person out of the chart.

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

If you want to chart the his-hers-theirs group separately (not as part of a larger chart), you can do as Terry suggested and copy and paste three charts together. An example of one possibility is attached. This is three left-to-right descendant charts, with spouse boxes (lighter shade) moved and edited to conserve space.

 

Virginia

[E Wilcock 0]

With the help of Virginia, Lee, Jim and others on the ROOTSWEB TMG list I have been learning how to use Chart Form for the first time in order to produce my blended tree using TMG.

I used a new project and dummy father as described in my previous post, but have not manipulated any birth or marriage dates to position the blended famiies on this tree.

 

I am still not expert at lines - it needs some finishing touches but I am pretty happy.

It shows what VCF can do.

 

Evelyn

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

It's beautiful, Evelyn. I can see now the challenges you faced in getting it arranged and compacted. The annotations are a nice touch, really bringing the chart to life. Thank you for sharing!

 

Virginia

[Mike Talbot 0]

I don't see a way to generate a chart for a "his, her, their" set of descendents. Is there any way to use a focus group to serve as the basis for a chart?

 

Is there a way to force one of the chart options to use a focus group, rather than the usual "focus person"?

 

I realize I can use the "focus group" to generate the narrative for everyone in the focus group, but I can't figure out how to chart the same info.

 

Thanks

 

Love what everyone has done on this topic. I wanted to respond to this interesting message, sooner, but was neck deep in another project.

 

In the family group selected for this example, Henry Watkins is also the brother-in-law of some of his children and the uncle of some of his grandchildren. One genealogical charting guideline had to be violated. Amelie Gounin’s second marriage and offspring had to be placed before those her first marriage to avoid confusing connector line crossovers.

 

The attached chart is similar to other “Yours, mine and ours” charts, and uses right to left orientation. It fits on an 8.5 x 22 inch sheet. It took about an hour to make. Far more time was spent writing this procedure amd explanation than doing the VCF work.

 

It is much easier for me to generate two VCF charts, one for the “yours” and another for the “mine” descendants. An added advantage of this approach is not having to mess in your database and maybe remembering to fix it. Copy and paste components from one VCF chart to another is sooo easy in VCF. You can sort of control where the pasted components will go by preselecting a component near the desired location in the destination VCF chart.

 

Deal with each of the two charts separately. For each chart, zoom to fit, group select (procedure defined in many places in this forum) and move the components closer together to save space. Spouses are group selected and moved up to touch the descendant boxes and those annoying and confusing lines connecting descendants to their spouses were group selected and deleted. Do most of your moves with counted jog (arrow) keys.

 

The appropriate components from the “mine” chart then were group selected, copied to the “yours” chart and moved to the appropriate spot, forming the desired “Yours, mine and ours” chart.

 

It is important to maintain a little of the horizontal offset of descendants from spouses for group selecting all descendants within generations for applying color accents. The offset will also come in handy should you ever desire to modify parts of the chart.

 

The color accents, using Virginia’s color palette and technique, were then applied to distinguish the “yours” from the “mine” from the “ours” descendants (blue and yellow make green logic). Again group selections were made, so that each color had to be applied only once (yes, you can combine multiple group selections for a single operation). Virginia’s color palette boxes were left in place and text was added to define the meaning of each color accent. The color accents are so important in making the chart easier to read.

 

In using group selections, don’t worry about getting some lines, points and text when only boxes are desired. All those other components are immune to most box operations that you will need (thankfully, except for moves) and vs.vs.

 

We could declare ourselves finished at this point, but to guild the lily, an ancestry chart was generated for Amelie Gounin. Those in her line of ascent through Am. Rev. War vets to a Micmaque Indian in Acadia were singly selected, while holding down the shift key. These components were copied and pasted to our final chart. The boxes were moved individually to form a line of descent and then color accented to Amelie Gounin’s color.

 

Connector lines were added to the line of descent as a final step. The lines don’t actually connect the boxes, but parts of them are hidden behind the boxes, making it appear that the boxes are connected. VCF connector lines sometimes appear to have a mind of their own, so this partially hidden line technique can save you a lot of grief.

 

Best wishes,

Mike Talbot