Family event timeline in Person View

[Neil 0]

Is there a way to have a Family Events Timeline in the Person View showing births, marriages, deaths, etc. of parents and children? This feature is available in Family Tree Maker 2009.

 

We all know TMG is the best so it should be able to do anything and everything that another program can do, right?

[Jim Byram 0]

You can make whatever custom timelines you wish.

 

You can also see much the same information that you see in the FTM Family View by creating a custom layout and including the Children and Siblings windows. Check out all of the available windows and the information that they include and experiment with building your own custom layouts. There are many examples of custom layouts in topics in this forum.

[Neil 0]

I already have the children and sibling windows. That doesn't give the same information as the time line. Like how old the focus person was when their son got married or their father died, etc.

 

How does one go about making a timeline like the one I am describing? I would think that it would be included in the program just as it is in FTM.

[Jim Byram 0]

TMG does not have a feature exactly like FTM 2009 which creates a timeline display for the individual with or without family and historical events.

 

The Person View shows a chronologically display of a person's events and children and you can add the age coulmn and save a custom layout.

 

You can add timelines to the display in the Person View by turning on one or more selected timelines.

Tools / Timeline Manager

 

There are many pre-constructed historical timelines but nothing like the automatically-generated family timeline in FTM. You would have to create a custom family timeline for an individual.

 

The feature in FTM is very nicely designed and much easier to use than the TMG timeline.

 

btw... When you describe a feature from another program, it would help if you described precisely how to look at the feature. You can't assume that anyone reading the topic has any idea what you are referring to.

[Neil 0]

Does TMG plan to add this feature in the near future?

[Neil 0]

The timeline feature in FTM 2009, when selected to be visible, adds events just like TMG timelines do. The nice feature with the FTM Family Events Timeline is, when looking at the Person View, you can see how old the focus person was when other family events took place during their lifetime. For example, one can see that the focus person was a certain age when his son got married or when his father or mother died.

 

How can one create a custom family timeline?

[Jim Byram 0]

Does TMG plan to add this feature in the near future?

Since such a feature has never been requested and the current wishlist is very long, I would guess not.

 

How can one create a custom family timeline?

You create custom timelines using the Timeline Manager. I would start out by reading the Timeline Manager topic in help.

[drla06 0]

In July 2008 I wrote the paragraphs below to request a "blended individual detail report" for a group of people. The request did not generate a lot of interest. Your request seems to be similar, so there does appear to be an interest in easily studying the events of a group of people. To satisfy the need I generated individual detail reports for each of the group members and then combined and edited the reports in a word processing program. The finished report gave a very good sense of how the family was interacting at the time. The changes in relationships and circumstances, e.g., death of spouse, sibling marries, purchase/sale of property, move to another state, are given a new perspective when they are studied as a whole. The age information was not included in my report, but it would be welcome. I add my support to your request. Such a report would be a valuable addition to the TMG toolbox.

 

From July 2008: "There is a group of people -- father, mother, four children and the children's spouses -- for whom I needed to make one combined list of their events in chronological order -- sort of timeline of the people's lives. I printed the Individual Detail report for each person separately, pruned the events to only those needed, and then added the person's name to each event and placed the events in chronological order. The blended sequence of events suggested a new reason for the events that occurred -- something that would have been more [difficult] to pick out without looking at the activities of the entire group.

 

Because I've incorporated the research log into the person view, all my research notes appear in PV and research notes were the majority of the tags I used in the above report. They are quite lengthy, too long to use the list of events reports, which I would have exported to Excel."

[Neil 0]

Does TMG plan to add this feature in the near future?

Since such a feature has never been requested and the current wishlist is very long, I would guess not.

 

How can one create a custom family timeline?

You create custom timelines using the Timeline Manager. I would start out by reading the Timeline Manager topic in help.

 

 

Is it possible for me to create a custom Family Timeline? If it is so simple that I could do, then wouldn't it be easier if TMG did it? We wouldn't want FTM to be one up on us would we?

[Jane Neuman 0]

Another potential option (depending on the number of events) is to add witnesses. You could add living children as a witness to the death of the parents, for example. Or, parents to the marriage of children, etc.

 

Just a thought ....

 

Jane