Simulating "Everyone Chart"

[Big J]

I understand that Reunion cannot produce an "everyone chart" due to unwieldiness (not a surprise, given file sizes in the hundreds of thousands referred to in the Forum!). Short of such a chart option with a size limit, does anyone have suggestions as to how to simulate one using existing chart types? With descendant charts, for example, I am not sure how I can identify the oldest ancestors of each family branch. I would like to minimize overlap, as well. Thanks in advance.

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

To identify oldest ancestors, use the ancestor fan chart. (If your ancestry goes back more than 10 generations, you may have to start a few generation back from yourself and make more then one chart.) Once you have the oldest ancestors on the fan chart, right click->go to family on any particular ancestor and then make a descendant chart for each ancestor.

Charts can get pretty big. I just recently made a descendant chart with 8 or 9000 people. It took 40 minutes to produce, but it worked.

[ttl]

To piggyback on Blaise's answer, you can avoid duplication between descendant charts by judicious marking of descendants between creating charts, and using the Prune: Marked descendants only option in the Charts panel. Or you can just manually delete the duplicate people in the chart you don't want them in after you've created it, and then redraw the chart using Tree>Orientation in the main menu at the top of the screen in the Reunion chart editor.

My approach would be to use a relative chart, which will capture all the blood relatives of a source person. I find that starting from a user's children/grandchildren will usually yield the most connected people. The only ones left out would be the blood relatives of a blood relative's spouse, who often aren't documented in the family file anyway. (And people in other islands.)

You can further extend the Everyone chart simulation by finding those blocks of people who were left out, creating a relative chart of each group starting with the spouse who's the connection, and then copying that chart and pasting it as an insert to the main chart. You can make the connection to the main chart by manually inserting connection lines, or by manually adding matching numbers to the connecting person in the main chart and the inserted chart.

[Bob White]

Food for thought. What I did for a family reunion on my mother's side several years ago. It only involved charting roughly 900 people. This side only goes back to my great-grandfather who had two sons and one daughter who died as a child. The two sons had a total of eleven children. So I made twelve charts. Eleven charts were one each for the eleven children and their descendants. The twelfth chart was the great-grandfather, two sons and the eleven offspring. Under each of the eleven, I added a number. That directed the observer to that branch elsewhere in the room where they found the full tree for that particular offspring.

This did a good job of spreading out people as the charts covered three walls of a roughly 25 foot squarish room. For my situation, this worked well. Just throwing this out as another possible approach. It might be unwieldy for several thousand people.

[ttl]

This did a good job of spreading out people as the charts covered three walls of a roughly 25 foot squarish room. For my situation, this worked well. Just throwing this out as another possible approach. It might be unwieldy for several thousand people.

Excellent approach! Would like to thumbs-up this.

[Big J]

Thanks, everyone! I'm off to try your ideas. My own chart is only about 600 people, maximum six generations, but wide, with a number of sub-trees by marriage, connecting at different generations. I am guessing that the most error-prone part will be to locate all of the marriage connections.