Saturday, April 17, 2010

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - a Family Timeline

Hey genea-friends, it's Saturday Night - time for more Genealogy Fun!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1) Open up your genealogy family tree software (you do have family tree software, right?) and:

2) Create a timeline for one or more of your ancestral families. The design is yours to create - make it as intricate or beautiful as you wish. timeline" - you should be able to find detailed instructions.


3) Show us your creation in a blog post of your own, as a comment to this blog post, or in a note or comment on Facebook. Tell us which software you used, too.

Here's mine:



I used RootsMagic 4 to create this three generation chart for my great-grandparents (Frederick and Alma Bessie (Richmond) Seaver, his parents and their children.

In RootsMagic, I selected Reports > Charts > Timeline Chart and then chose "Select from list) on the "People to include" dropdown menu. I selected a highlighted person in the "Select People" screen (I chose Frederick Walton Seaver), checked his name, then in the "Mark People" dropdown list I selected "Family of highlighted person" and checked both "As a parents with spouse" and "As a Child with parents." Then clicked on OK > OK > Generate Report and the chart was created.

To create the image above, I did a screen capture with "Print Screen," pasted the image into MSWord, right-clicked the image and saved it as a PNG file, then brought the image into the Microsoft digital Editor program and cropped it, then saved it to a file, and imported it into Blogger.

As an alternative, I could have manually checked any number of names in the "Select People" list to include Frederick's siblings, other spouses, etc.

I wonder how many different software programs will be used to do this task tonight? Have fun!

9 comments:

Celia Lewis said...

Hmmm. RootsMagic did a great job. Legacy was more or less adequate but not as flexible. FamilyTreeMaker 2005 didn't give me options of how many generations etc. - maybe the 2010 version has that versatility. Interesting result on RM4 - lots of very long-lived women in this family of mine! Cheers - Celia

Jean said...

Randy, this was interesting. My program, The Master Genealogist (TMG) doesn't have a similar feature I could find, so I did one in RM4 also: http://hoffman-news.blogspot.com/2010/04/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-hoffman.html

Terri O'Connell said...

Put one together in Reunion, had a hard time inserting it into the blog. http://wp.me/pugQZ-eL

Sara Greenleaf said...

I also used Reunion, and was able to save my chart as a JPEG to insert into my blog: http://bit.ly/9cuhOO

Unknown said...

Here's another chart using Reunion

Anonymous said...

I used Reunion. Was easy enough. Reunion saved the file automatically as a png. Then edited it in PSE and saved it as a jpg. Then placed it into blog. Had to use medium size in order for it to fit into blog. Roots Magic seems to have done a better timeline than Reunion.

Anonymous said...

Don't have a blog and didn't do a timeline, but thought some of you might want to have a look at this timeline software. I think it would work well for problem solving if your genealogy software doesn't have what you need.

Jo said...

I also used RootsMagic 4, it was between that and The Master Genealogist which doesn't have the capacity to easily create a timeline for an individual. I like RM4. It's easy to use and has lots of bells and whistles. Here is my post http://arnspiger.blogspot.com/2010/04/genea-musings-saturday-night-challenge.html

Midge Frazel said...

Here's mine for a project I am working on. Great directions Randy!
http://tinyurl.com/y5ektz8