Larger family books

[ksajdak]

I like the Book Report, but find it difficult to deal with larger families.

Here are my 2 problem with Reunion books . . .

1) If you want to create an extended book that includes my cousins, I have to start with my grandparents. But I can only show my maternal or paternal sides and not both.

2) Doing the "Hourglass" book, including notes, ends up duplicating the note in both ancestor and descendant sections.

Anyone know how to "fix" either of these?

[edohmann]

My approach to this sort of thing is to break the project down into multiple "books" which I treat as individual chapters rather than trying to generate everything in one pass.

My current project is a a large 2-Volume Book with Volume 1 being about 800 pages. Vol 2 will be about half that size. The focal point of Vol 1 is my immigrant great-great-grandparents. I started with a 3-genaration Descendant Report of my gg-grandfather. (starting with his grandparents). This book includes Vitals (birth, death, etc), Misc Notes and Preferred Photos, but no Media Pages.

I then used Word to generate several additional files to merge into that first book: 1. A Biography of my GG-grandparents 2. An Ancestral study of my GG-grandfather (with charts from Reunion) 3. An Ancestral study of my GG-grandmother (with charts from Reunion) and 4. A Foreword to the overall large 2-volume book. Those Biography & Ancestral Studies include a number of photos inserted into the Word documents. I then generated PDFs of each of those 4 additional files and merged them into the the 3-gen Descendant Report generated by Reunion. That overall book now becomes the "Master Book" for Volume 1.

The reason for doing it as a 2-Volume book is just to keep the overall size somewhat manageable plus the fact that most Print On Demand services have a page limit of about 840 or so. The remainder of Vol 1 is a study of my great-grandfather and his descendants. Volume 2 will be a study of his siblings.

The next step was to generate a "book" for my great-grandparents. This is a 2-generation Descendant Report so it only has my g-grandparents and their children. Report options are the same as for the descendant report of my gg-grandfather's grandparents except Misc Notes are omitted. I then generated several more files with Word: 1. Ancestral Study of my G-grandmother 2. Biography of my g-grandparents and 3. Since he was a Civil War soldier, a report on his unit's activities during the war. I then generated PDFs of those 3 reports and merged them into the overall book on my great-grandparents, then generated a PDF file of that overall book and merged it into the Master Book for Vol 1.

The next step was to generate 7 more books for each of the children of my great-grandparents. That would be one for my grandfather and one for each of his 6 siblings. Those 7 book each contain a full Descendant Report of their descendants with Vitals, Misc Notes, Preferred Photos, and Media Pages. For each of those "book" I also generated some additional Word files: 1. A Group Photos section with family photos that would not show up well in the small media pages images, and also so I can annotate them and 2. A Family Stories section where I can include stories & photos about those heads of families and others with interesting stories. Then I generated those 7 individual PDF "books" and merged them into the Master Vol 1 book, in birth order right behind the chapter for my great-grandparents.

Once that last step is done, then the overall Master Vol 1 Book is generated as the Final Book, ready for publishing (almost). A little more tweaking of the final PDF file is still needed, but I'll skip that for now.

The interesting thing about this approach is that each of those 9 books (or chapters) has its own Table of Contents. The Master Book will have a TOC that includes its individual sections as well as all the additional "books" that were merged into it. Each of those books will have its own TOC and two sets of page numbers: one page number for its own section and one page number for the overall Master Book. Some may not like this feature, but I think it helps to keep those sections organized.

Regardless of whether you use this particular approach, when it comes to large books, I think it helps to give some thought to the overall structure and organization of what you want to accomplish and consider whether you can accomplish everything you want with Reunion alone or if you might want to use Word or other applications to help produce some of the content for your book.

Best wishes with your project.

[ksajdak]

Is there a way to suppress page numbering and indexing (although I love that feature)?

[edohmann]

There is no way that I know of to suppress page numbering. However, there is a simple work-around to eliminate indexing. Make sure that your Person Index is the last thing before the Back Cover (it usually is, but it can be moved around) and be sure to uncheck "Include in Table of Contents". Then after you generate your PDF, you can use Acrobat or another PDF editing program to delete those pages.

That is actually one of my final steps before finalizing my large PDF files for printing. Frankly, Reunion's Person Indexing is just too limited to be useful for my needs. It only indexes the individuals in the Descendant Report and there is no way to include people that you might mention in Misc Notes or in other files that you merge into the Reunion Report. I would like to have a Person Index for my books, but if I can't include every person, wherever their name might appear, I would rather do without an index.

[jimpres]

What is the best report to print for family members who are not familiar with genealogy? In oter words a paper document of you files.

[edohmann]

I would say either an Ancestral Report or a Descendant Report or a combination of the two. They are the most logically “readable” reports IMO.