Some people don't know when to stop

Most family groups are very simple with just a couple of children born to a single couple.

However, in years gone by, some families have had many more children with one of my direct ancestor couples producing 12 children just over 100 years ago. How did they manage to afford to raise so many? He was a village postmaster and not some rich aristocrat.

I am sure that other forum members can find instances of even larger families but I thought it worth starting a discussion about the complexity of some relationships. I like to see the pictorial representation of family trees rather than just data in tables but sometimes this can be difficult to draw clearly.

About 150 years ago, blood relatives of mine started a simple family . . .
A married B and had 2 children. Elsewhere, C married D and also had 2 children.
Then B and C died leaving A and D to marry. So far, not too unusual.
Not content with the combined family, they then produced another six themselves, at which point it was just too much and D passed away.
A obviously did not relish a life without a mate so was married for a third time and had another child to add to the family.

Then yesterday evening I discovered that A and D had produced a seventh child, before any of their previously known six. This was not the simplest of additions to make to the graphical family tree but I eventually found out how to identify which were the parents of the new child, within GenoPro, by separating the marriage lines. That particular chart is now looking a bit like a spider's web.

Have any forum members had more complex relationships to represent using other family tree programs?

 

Thank heaven for computer programs, of any sort! If my tree were on paper it would be incomprehensible. Even discounting the more distant cousins (with e.g brothers marrying a mother and daughter, a man marrying 2 sisters in succession and having children by both) I have one set of my GG Gparents being first cousins, and a GGF marrying his sister-in-law's sister (2 brothers marrying 2 sisters). There's only so much you can do with dotted lines, after all.

 

Interesting. For me, the graphical layout is core to the whole business of genealogy and I don't think that my interest would be maintained without it. I view everything in this format and only refer to tablular information when looking for more detail.

When I first started, with GR, I could see that any tree was likely to become too large to view as a single chart so decided to make things more manageable in GenoPro by having separate charts for each surname. Off page connectors, called external hyperlinks, then provide an easy and quick way to move between the various charts. That way I can see how the families are connected. I was always more of a physicist than a mathematician and needed to visualise a situation rather than just apply a formula.

I have also tried to lay out a chart with vertical spacing to reflect the passage of time but that then leads to further complications and messiness although it can make some anomalous situations more obvious.

The difficulty for me, at the start of this thread, resulted from having all partners joined on the same horizontal line across the chart. Adding a newly discovered child in the middle was then difficult to identify to the program which of the various partners were the parents. All became easy when I realised that I could separate the individual marriage lines vertically. As Tim says, use of differing colours for each marriage line can make this clearer.

I was curious to know how other members managed with similar or more complex situations using other family tree products. If others do not rely on the graphical representation as much as me then perhaps they do not see this as a problem.

 

Ok, each to his/her own prefered method of working. My interest lies more in how/where the families originated and how they moved/developed rather than concentrating on getting the individual facts stored on the computer, which I just see as a means to an end. Hence my appreciation of the checks and displays being provided by FTA. I look at the family charts which have been created the way that I prefer to see them rather than have them automatically generated and require some modification by me each time.There are some parts of my tree where I am sure that things are not quite right and I can allow for that in my charts. If they were always automatically generated from the incomplete/incorrect data then that might not be so obvious.

That's just my preference (at the moment) and I am interested to learn how others fare with other products, without going into too much detail. After all, a change of family tree program is not a trivial activity but should be considered if it becomes apparent that there is an exceptional benefit to be gained from doing so. I don't have the time or money to install/test/review/evaluate all new features of the various products available and am happy to be guided by others' experiences, at least initially.

 

I have only just found this discussion which I find most interesting. It seems I am more like Alexander in my approach to recording data in my preferred FT program, and my recent gravitation to FTM which is quite different but gradually growing on me. I do have Gen Pro but exclusively for its chart making properties. The charts are all the better because they can be modified and manipulated to suit your preferences.

It is when dealing with the family that Gen Pro comes into its own. They are already able to read the minutia details about any member who concerns them by logging on (with supplied access code) to my Tribal Pages. Even so it is only when I produce a chart which I send or take to them (invariably encapsulated) that their eyes light up. This seems to satisfy in a way no about of data can achieve. There is nothing in the chart they could not find out in Tribal Pages but a Chart can be hung on the wall or passed around for individual viewing and that pleases them more than anything.

So I think the bottom line is go with whatever suits and if that be a chart or a FT program of your choice, so be it!