Printing entire tree - need assistance

TreeDraw Standard Edition and TreeDraw Legacy Edition; our genealogy charting software.

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kdern
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:52 pm

Printing entire tree - need assistance

Post by kdern » Wed Feb 20, 2008 5:26 pm

Hi - I'm very new to this software.

It seems like the only way to print an entire tree is to merge trees of several ancestors. Is that correct?

Can someone give me some tips on how to merge two trees? I tried it and all the names were overlapping, and I couldn't figure out how to make everything line up. Any suggestions on how to start?

Also - if I am doing this by merging several ancestor's trees, it doesn't show in-laws (the families of spouses). Would I have to merge them manually as well?

Is this even possible using this software? FYI: I have 400 people on my tree.

Thanks for your help.

Nick Hunter
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Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2005 9:36 am
Location: SpanSoft, Scotland
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Post by Nick Hunter » Wed Feb 20, 2008 5:31 pm

It's much better to use Descendant trees instead of Ancestral trees. Descendant trees include all the siblings and their spouses.

TreeDraw always starts a new import in the top-left of the drawing area so if you are importing several trees into the same chart you must drag the trees to a different part of the drawing area where you can merge them together.

Merging several trees requires a fair bit of manual manipulation and methods vary.

kdern
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:52 pm

Merging

Post by kdern » Wed Feb 20, 2008 5:35 pm

After playing with this a bit, I see how to merge two trees. But it seems like I would have to merge many trees to get everyone on one tree... does that sound right?

Has anyone out there actually done this? Any tips on how to go about it?

Graham Hadfield
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Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2005 8:05 am
Location: Middlesbrough, UK
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Re: Merging

Post by Graham Hadfield » Thu Feb 21, 2008 8:27 am

kdern wrote:After playing with this a bit, I see how to merge two trees. But it seems like I would have to merge many trees to get everyone on one tree... does that sound right?

Has anyone out there actually done this? Any tips on how to go about it?
Yes, we've done it regularly for customers. The most complex was for all descendants of ten ancestral lines with several cousin marriages - which did necessitate showing a few people on the chart twice to avoid crossing lines.

As Nick said, the best way is to use Descendant trees. I normally start out by identifying the youngest person in the file and drawing an Ancestor chart for that person to identify all "furthest back" ancestors on which to base the Descendant charts.

I then select what appears to be the Descendant chart which will include most people. Having done so I move the whole lot to leave the top left corner free and create the next chart to merge in - and so on.

Graham

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