I haven’t seen any previous posts on his.
There are times I would like to display a biological family unit in one look. Ideally in the family view. The problem comes when there are multiple spouses. The display is the family unit of the current (or selected) spouse only. I guess I would like to see a biological family unit. Anyone have any tricks to accomplish that.
I’m not 100% sure how you are proposing that the biological family look like on the screen. The closest you can come is probably to use Descendant View set to 2 generations. For whichever person you place in the primary position of descendant view (the top position), it will show all their spouses and children. For many different reasons, I use Descendant View set to 2 generations a great deal more in RM8/9/10 than I did in RM7, and I use Family View in RM8/9/10 a great deal less than I did in RM7.
The problem is if one or more of the spouses of the primary person in Descendant View has additional children from additional marriages. In that case, the additional children are not the biological children of the primary person but they are biological children of the spouses. They may or may not also be be adoptive or “raised by” children of the primary person. It’s not clear to me that any good way to show these relationships graphically really exists.
For example, between them my two grandfathers were married 5 times with no divorces. Both of them became widowers as very young men with very young children. They both remarried and had children with their second wife. One of them married for a third time as a widower in his 70’s. Their blended families were raised together and the children were half siblings. But the adult children of my grandfather’s third wife were not siblings at all with my grandfather’s other children.
But if you flip the situation and display either of my grandmothers as the primary person in Descendant View set to 2 generations, then there are children of my grandfathers that were raised by my grandmothers without a formal adoption and the children were half siblings. So how can this situations be displayed on the screen in a way that is both holistic and accurate? I don’t know.
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Question, to set a person as primary for descendants view you would set them as the root person? I see where the descendants view does have the info
What I’m trying to accomplish is this. I want to create a picture of a family unit as complete as possible, that I can provide to that family. Initially it would be to collect needed missing info but ultimately to give them a picture as things need to get added or change. I can go into more detail but just keeping explanation simple at this time.
The focus person on the Descendant view wouldn’t necessarily be the root person. They can be anyone you select. If you want to move someone already on the descendant view up to the primary position right click on them, and select Position, move to primary position.
Got it thank you. That works
Since you want to create this and give it to someone else-- you could do a report and print it or save it several ways to email–options
- Descendant List-- same as descendant view with birth/month/ places— there are several options under List format
- If you want to include every fact you had for a person, you could do a narrative report–last 3 under report type are indented BUT it can get very long if you have a lot of facts…
- Individual Summary-- will give you all facts, parents, spouses and kids but the kids are only listed by birth/ death year…
If you are interested in the facts for a child as well as spouse of the child , there is also the report called Family Group Sheet— you pick the person and their spouses–it then creates a report with every fact for every person and all spouses for the kids if you check the box
Those are great ideas. I am new to RM and looks like I’ll have to look into the reports. Thats why I want to get info out to families to verify what I have and fill in what I don’t
This is a great question to post on a general interest genealogy forum.
It would be cool to see a listing of what ideas have already been implemented.