Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Making Ancestor and Descendant Reports in Geni.com

Genealogist and San Diegan Kitty Cooper wrote New at GENI - Ancestor and Descendants Lists last week on her blog, Kitty Cooper's Blog.  I wanted to try it out also.

1)  On my Geni.com profile, I opened the "Actions" button on the upper right of the screen:


On the "Actions" dropdown menu, "Ancestor Report" is one of the options, as is "Descendant Report."

2)  I clicked on the "Ancestor Report" link and the screen for "Ancestors of Randall Jeffrey Seaver" opened, showing four generations (the default number):


I wanted to see more generations, so I moved the scale over to 14 generations, and after several minutes, the screen showed me 14 generations of ancestors according to Geni.com:


That was cool.  However, I saw a number of errors in the list, with duplicate spouses, or named ancestors that I "know" are erroneous.  Those are opportunities for improvement on the Geni.com World Tree for me to deal with!

Then I wanted to save this list to my computer so that I can work with it.  I clicked the "Export PDF" and waited forever for it to be created.  I think I brought Geni to its knees.  After at least 45 minutes, the 161 page report (over 13 mb) was created:


3)  Next, I wanted to make a Descendant chart for my 5th great-grandfather, Norman Seaver (1734-1787).  I went to his profile, clicked on the "Actions" button, selected "Descendant Report" and moved the generations scale to 7 generations.  That created the Descendant Report below:



Again, I wanted to save this report as a PDF, so I clicked the "Export PDF" button and a three page PDF downloaded, with indentations for each generation.


One problem with this exported PDF is that as the number of generations increased, the text ran off the right edge of the page for the later generations, as shown below:


This happened on the Ancestor Report also.

4)  These reports should be very useful, but the PDF export problems need to be overcome somehow.

I recommend that Geni.com add an Ahnentafel Report to the list of Actions, so that the ancestors can be listed in Pedigree chart order, and "holes" where ancestors are unknown, are listed.

Using the Ancestor Report, I need to make a concerted effort to merge duplicate profiles (there are some in my Ancestor Report) on Geni.com, start discussions to fix "wrong" relationships, and unlink those "wrong" persons.

The Descendant Report can be helpful to see if I have all of my cousins in my RootsMagic database.

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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

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