Fan Chart - how to automatically Colour Boxes based on birth country

[Brian C]

My children have asked on several occasions, "what countries did our ancestors come from ?" I've responded by creating a fan chart and manually editing the colour of each box to represent the country of birth. Country of death is also of possible interest - or any other event. Manually editing a fan chart is tedious. I'm hoping there is an automatic way of doing it. Is there a way of doing this in Reunion 14 ?

[Barnbarroch]

How about giving a new parent to each such branch containing the country of origin? So, one branch would be children of Austria and one of them would intermarry with a child of England. Or even, a descendant of Austria, Royalty could marry one from Austria, Peasant and, later, cross with an England, Yeoman Farmer descendant.

That doesn't quite answer your original question; the problem with what you first asked is that many boxes will quickly start to look like rainbows as the lines of people of different origins combine.

[A Ginn]

I can't offer automation, but there is an easier manual process. Coloring all the cells doesn't necessarily require editing each one separately. If you haven't already tried this, set the color for the center/source cell and "Apply Attributes to other Cells - Fill Color - To Ancestors". Then, as you move outward through the rings, whenever you come across a parent whose country of birth is different from that of the child (i.e., the cell shouldn't be the color it is) edit that cell with the different country's color and perform the same "Apply" to his/her ancestors.

The occasional exception when the "Apply" step should be skipped is if a child was born in A, the parent being edited was born in B, but the grandparents were also born in A. For example, the parent was born overseas to an expat or stationed couple but his/her child was born back home.

This method should involve far fewer edits than there are cells. It could help with other event places or with facts common to multiple generations, such as native language or religious denomination.

[Brian C]

I can't offer automation, but there is an easier manual process. Coloring all the cells doesn't necessarily require editing each one separately. If you haven't already tried this, set the color for the center/source cell and "Apply Attributes to other Cells - Fill Color - To Ancestors". Then, as you move outward through the rings, whenever you come across a parent whose country of birth is different from that of the child (i.e., the cell shouldn't be the color it is) edit that cell with the different country's color and perform the same "Apply" to his/her ancestors.

The occasional exception when the "Apply" step should be skipped is if a child was born in A, the parent being edited was born in B, but the grandparents were also born in A. For example, the parent was born overseas to an expat or stationed couple but his/her child was born back home.

This method should involve far fewer edits than there are cells. It could help with other event places or with facts common to multiple generations, such as native language or religious denomination.

I like this idea - Thank you