I disagree with the premise that it should be just like RM7. The feature I am requesting for Descendant View has been needed for years or even for decades. The fact that RM7 didn’t have the feature doesn’t mean RM7 didn’t need it. I asked for it many times in those days. And I think that RM10 also needs the feature.
That being said, your comment about the collapsible button to the left of the spouse rang a bell. Here is an example of what I consider to be the problem. Here is a 2 generation Descendant View. It is less than I want to see.
Here is a 3 generation Descendant View of the same family. It is more than I want to see because I don’t want to see the children of the rightmost generation. So I want to see more than the 2 generation view and less than the 3 generation view.
So as you suggested, I collapsed all the children in the right most generation. To tell you the truth, I had considered the collapsed children feature as useful just for one line rather than using it for all the lines. That’s probably a failure of imagination on my part. So here is what it looks like with all the lines of children in the right most generation collapsed. It is doable, but I had to click a bunch of times to collapse all the families. In the context of my request, I am collapsing all the children in the 3 generation view rather than adding the spouses to the 2 generation view. But the effect is essentially the same. It very much gives me the effect I need except for having to click so much to collapse all the children for each spouse.
If it would make the RM developers happier with my request, consider it a request for an option just like the number of generations is an option to auto-collapse the children in the right most generation. So instead of doing a 2 generation Descendant View with spouses I could do a 3 generation Descendant View with the children of the right most generation collapsed. With this option available, I wouldn’t have to do so much clicking to collapse the children of the rightmost generation. A further reason for this option is that if I temporarily switch to another view and then back to Descendant View, then all my collapsing is gone and I have to click a bunch of times all over again to get it back. With the option, I wouldn’t lose the collapsing if I switch views and then return to Descendant View.
But there is still one more thing, and I have complained about this one many times before. I find the RM8/9/10 Descendant View much harder to look at and interpret than was the RM7 Descendant View. The primary problem is the indention of the spouses. In RM7, spouses were indented in such a way that they clearly stood out. In RM8/9/10, the spouses essentially are not indented and they are hard to differentiate visually from the descendants. The + sign is not sufficient identification. The spouses also need to be indented. Here is how they might look. I think it’s much easier to identify the spouses when they are indented in this fashion.
Confirming request for collapsing and expanding nodes by generation has been reported to development. There is a challenge with remembering node settings when moving between views and pages. RM has to rebuild the descendant list because children and spouses could have been added. When it rebuilds the whole list it has no idea what nodes were expanded and which were collapsed.
I do understand the challenge if the goal is to put Descendant View’s collapsing status back the way it was when returning to it. But when I was testing just now with 3 generations, I collapsed all the grandchildren for all the spouses of all the children, I switched to Family View, and then I switched back to Descendant View. At that point, all the collapsing was gone. Is it supposed to remember the collapsing status?
I think we are saying the same thing. The present behavior does not remember the collapse status between views. It also would not need to remember the collapse status between views if my proposal were adopted.
Suppose my proposal to have an option to collapse the right-most childern.were adopted and suppose the option to collapse the right most children were turned on. Then as long is the option remained turned on, any switch to Descendant View would apply the option as a part of rebuilding the list. There would no challenge of remembering the node status. As a part of rebuilding the list, the right-most children would be collapsed or not collapsed, depending on the current setting of the option.
I have been playing with the idea of collapsing all the rightmost children in Descendant View. My initial reaction is that RM is much too quick to forget the collapse status. As already discussed, it forgets the collapse status if you move from Descendant View to another main view and then back to Descendant View. That one doesn’t bother me. In fact, I think I even prefer it.
But here is the problem. I find that RM forgets the collapse status in Descendant View if I go into and out of Edit Person. It also forgets the collapse status if I right click a person and Jump To either Ancestry or Family Search. In none of these cases have I switched to another view.
If my proposed new option were in effect, it would take care of this problem for my own use case. I don’t know how other RM users might feel who might be using the collapse feature in Descendant View more selectively than I want to use it.
I’m not having a refresh of the Descendant View if I right click and jump to Ancestry or FamilySearch. I do have a refresh after I close the Edit Person screen, but that’s a given because you may have added data.
Here is my proposal to add all Spousal access to the Family panel while respecting the family limits for each marriage yet allowing easy in-line switching between spouses and related children:
As shown the spouses would follow the Descendant report format of being indented and connected to selected Family head. By default the first spouse in order would be active. Access to other spouses via a click to shift the focus to that spouse.
Children counts would be displayed as well as an expand option for children detail listing.
A variation of my original proposal, but yours would work well also. I like that you have the number of children listed in bold type next to the name. I appreciate that you took the time to create the image of what you’re envisioning. What neither of us has done is talk about how to indicate that a wife has had more than one spouse.
The navigation of spouse’s who have remarried has always been more involved and the current method would work for those additional spousal marriages (i.e. leaving the current Family page in favor of another). The offer I made keeps one page in-line editing in place for the Head of Household.
I worked on the basis of the children being correctly accounted for in preparing the image offered. By making the child listings optional the Family screen can display up to four spouses for the selected head of household. That covers most of the families in my experience.
Sorry maybe I missed something BUT as I understand from this and what you said in the next post is that this only pertains to the father–BUT WHAT ABT THE MOTHER WHO MIGHT HAVE HAD KIDS BY 2 OR 4 OR 7 HUBBIES? (and yes I have a woman who had kids by 7 hubbies)–ARE ONLY WIVES AND KIDS OF THE FATHER IMPORTANT? With this as you said I would have to USE THE CURRENT VERSION or go to 7 different hubbies!!!
The whole idea of this thread is to suggest better ways to see other spouses instead of using what is already available and / or adding the RM 7 buttons --so in my opinion an idea/suggestion that does NOT include both the spouses for the mother and spouses for the father is only half way there as there are just as many or more women who married and had kids by multiple spouses…
Agreed. There needs to be some way to indicate that a mother has had more than one husband. I too have women who have remarried, though not 7x ! I’m too lazy to visually create this tonight, but my thought would be to have narrow boxes with the names of the alternative spouses. For the man the names of his other wives would be in narrow boxes/windows adherent to the lower border of the displayed man. For the woman, they’d be adherent to the upper border of the displayed woman. I suppose if there were so many alternative spouses the space between the displayed husband and wife would have to expand and the list of visible children contract.
Wow - I have obviously unintentionally touched your third rail. We can have discussions without yelling and sarcasm. Please accept my apology for any offense you found with my discussion entry. It was offered within the constraints of the overall program.
I have a particular interest in following additional spousal marriage families. I am directly related to three children of an ancestor who arrived in America 400 years ago. That said I offer the following:
For thousands of years genealogical tracing was done by defining the male as head of family/household. This was first done in thousands of years of verbal history, hundreds of years of written history and - in the last 40 years - by computer aided data storage programs. The use of computers finally opened up a robust ability to trace a multitude of different trees/roots/branches and their interconnections to each other.
Computers need a ‘Head of Household’ to define and connect all the facts for each family, including all marriages. Additional families of any spouse would require accessing the different unconnected family pages which would not be linked to the original Head of Household as noted above. In this respect the RM10 Info Panel currently gives a relatively quick opportunity to view and select these pages.
In closing this missive I would ask you to consider the impact on the Family screen should the head of family and each spouse have 7 mates and children, as per your example. Displaying all of this would shrink the 49 on-screen links so small as to render the material unreadable in the first screen or require scrolling through a dozen additional screens, with the accompanying connectivity issues.
I would invite you to share your thoughts on how to address the issues raised in your missive. I am sure the community would be interested.
Alice Thompson actually had three husbands; they kept dying on her. David’s second wife is just a confabulation to show where extra spouses of the husband would go. I liked the suggestion above of having the number of children with the alternative spouse listed as a number to the right of their name. I added the order of marriage to the left of the alternative spouses.
I’m the original poster and my point in starting this was because in RM 10 I had missed the fact that the husband I was working with had been married a second time. I was making a proposal to the group and indirectly to the developers on how to help everyone recognize quickly when a person has been married multiple times without having to remember to look for it.
There’s nothing wrong with having the side panel. I just didn’t include it in my diagram.
PS cvernons, your proposal would work equally well, but I’m not inside your head to see how you’d handle multiple husbands so I’ll leave it to you to create an image of that if you want. We’ve all got family members, both male and female who married more than once.
Personally, I think this all rather messy for the Family View. If I want to see multiple spouses and children I use the Descendant View. On the Family View the old spouse button in RM7 gave a cleaner understanding at a glance that you may have other spouses. Now my eye is trained to look at the spouse tab on the right, or the family tab in the sidebar.
My last post on this subject as I do not want to keep going down the rabbit hole!
I work with one family unit at a time so that is my focus. As this string attests the graphical display does not support large amounts of data display - see how small the data elements are getting in your screen image. I just want to simplify the display of the rest of a single family’s members. I can use Edit to see if there are additional marriage records for a spouse. Maybe adding a count of those marriage records next to the Children Count would work.
Lets keep it relevant to the family unit displayed (that was retrieved in the original search) and not on displaying all the information in your entire file on one screen. [Sorry, my debating instinct of carrying a request to it’s illogical extreme keeps rearing it’s head].
I agree. I’m not sure why Family View needs to look like Descendant View. If you need Descendant View, just use Descendant View. Ever since RM8, I use Descendant View a great deal more than I use Family View.
Of course, if I had my way, RM10’s Family View would not even have the spouses of the children. I honestly don’t remember there ever being any big demand for the Family View to show the spouses of children. Instead, I would prefer that Family View would show more children on the screen at the same time and it would include full birth dates and places and full death dates and places for all the children.
I never use that, but I gave it a try to see if I’ve been missing a better way to do things, but that doesn’t work well. Technically you can see the presence of multiple spouses, but for only one spouse. Also, I often want to go to the next generation older and the Family View lets me do that. The Descendant view doesn’t. That solution doesn’t work well for me.
Although I was aware of the spouse tab in the sidebar my eye isn’t automatically drawn to look over there. That’s how the mistake occurred. There needs to be something visual in the Family View screen itself that calls attention to the presence of other spouses. My graphic isn’t professional looking, but I don’t believe a narrow band of alternative spouses to click on is very obtrusive. Although I’ve been a user since 2019 and used RM7 for a year or so prior to the 8 beta, I’m just having difficulty recalling how RM7 worked even though some have shown screen shots of the spouse tab/window.
