ROOTS-L Archives

From: Marty Hoag <>
Subject: Re: PAF & family trees From soc.roots
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 89 12:18:40 CDT

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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I'm posting the following for David Magier, who replied to my
request for more details about how he uses MORE to build trees
from outline format. Outline format can be produced by doing a
descendants chart in PAF and then running a few editor macros to
eliminate the extraneous data like RINs. You'd also have to
arrange the spouses as shown here, but that could also be
easily done with an editor like Word. I just finished making
a 9-page tree from a descendants chart, using only Word, since
I don't have MORE. It took 4 days to do and was rather painful,
but now that I know what I'm doing, I could probably do it faster.
But it would sure be nicer to have software do it for me! Thanks,
David!

--Holly
--------------------------------------------
Holly, sorry for the delay in answering. Yes, the 'outline' format for
PAF descendant charts can be plugged into MORE. The program turns them
into trees (in the style of organizational charts), which are actually
very elegant. Each node on the tree is a box. You can control the size
of the box (length and width separately), the shape of the box
(rectangle, rounded rectangle, or circle), the horizontal offset
between boxes in the tree as a whole, and the vertical offset between
boxes. You can also specify the thickness of the box borders, and can
have 'shadow effect' shading to give a sort of 3D effect (the boxes
appear to be floating slightly above the page). The program handles
very large trees with no problems at all. Limitations:

a) no, you cannot move things around or otherwise edit the output
trees, except by re-organizing the outline structure itself (ie. who
begat whom).
b) a family is represented by one box with offspring boxes below it
(connected by right-angle, rounded-angle, or diagonal lines to the
parent box). The problem comes if you want to represent both parents of
the family. The way I have found to do this is to put both parents into
one box (by placing them on the same line in the outline structure).
Thus, a mini-family tree might be generated from an outline like this:

Roger SMITH (1902) [w.Sheila Graham)
Thomas SMITH (1928) [w.Alice Cox)
Betty SMITH (1948) [h.Fred Jones)
Jane JONES (1970)
Robert JONES (1973)
Frank Smith (1950)
Cynthia SMITH (1930) [h.Everett Horn)
Gail HORN (1952)
Joseph SMITH
.
.
.
So each Descendant of Roger Smith (with his or her spouse) will appear
in a single box, with their offspring branching down from that box. It
works pretty nicely, except in the case of multiple marriages. What I
do then is to have an artificial layer (generation) of boxes which
represent each of the marriages:

Bob JONES (1900) [w1.Betsy Wake, w2.Sarah Banks]
{Bob JONES' children by Betsy Wake}
Beth JONES (1922) [h.Paul SOUTH]
Jim SOUTH
David SOUTH
Brian JONES (1925) [w.Ann PIKE]
Keith JONES
Raymond JONES
{Bob JONES' children by Sarah Banks}
Amy JONES (1932) [h.Donald WOLF]
Michael WOLF
Evan JONES (1934) [w.Karen SCOTT]
William JONES (1962)
.
.
.
The problem with this is that children of such multiple marriages will
appear in the tree one level lower (i.e. as if one generation later)
than their first cousins. That is, by inserting an artifical generation
layer of boxes to label the multiple marriages, you puch all the
descendants of those marriages DOWN one level, raltive to the offspring
of, say, Bob Jones' brothers and sisters, who may have only had one
marriage.

Anyway, despite the limitations, this approach works best for me for
now, until something nicer and more direct (perhaps within an update of
PAF) comes along.

Keep in touch.
David Magier

This thread:

• Re: PAF & family trees From soc.roots by Marty Hoag <>