Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Have You Tried One Page Genealogy?

I have, and it turned out to be a really big page.  But I digress.

One Page Genealogy is another online program from the  Brigham Young University Family History Technology Lab, which is a non-profit, student research lab sponsored by the Brigham Young University Computer Science Department.  James Tanner has a first look at One Page Genealogy on his Rejoice and Be Exceeding glad... blog.  The publicity for this program says:

" One Page Genealogy is the place for you to view, customize and download your family tree all on one page.  View up to 20 generations of ascendancy or descendancy.  Change colors and tree styles.  Download and print to show your friends!"

1)  I decided to try it, so I clicked on the link (https://opg.fhtl.byu.edu/) and saw:


There are three options here:

*  "My Tree" in the FamilySearch Family Tree (after logging into FamilySearch)
*  "Other Tree" in the FamilySearch Family Tree (for some other starting person)
*  "GEDCOM" of an uploaded GEDCOM file.

I created a GEDCOM file in RootsMagic of just my ancestors back for 15 generations.

1)  I clicked on the "GEDCOM" option on the screen above, selected my GEDCOM file from my computer file folders, and saw the "GEDCOM Options" screen:


I clicked on the down arrow for the "Set person as start of chart" and selected myself, then increased the number of generations from 8 to 12.  The "Ascendancy" button was already selected.

3)  I clicked on the "Save changes" button and it took about 8 seconds to upload my GEDCOM file with 2,210 persons.  The pedigree chart appeared on the screen:


I scrolled my mouse up and down to zoom in or zoom out (there are also Zoom buttons above the chart) on the 12 generations shown on the chart.  Here is a view of the whole tree:


There is a button above the chart to rotate it 90 degrees, so I rotated it right to see the chart from top to bottom.  I am the purple person at the top:


4)  You can place your mouse over any of the persons in the chart, and click and see the information for that person:


5)  Over on the right side of the screen, are controls for Styles, Colors, Options, New Chart, Find, Re-center, Chart Stats and Help.

I clicked on "Styles" and a box appeared to the left of the menu:


The "Styles" available include:

*  Full Detail Style
*  Family Reunion Style
*  Extended Style (13+ Generations)
*  Vertical Detail Style (Default)
*  Vertical Detail Accent Style
*  Bubble Style (I used this in the screens above and below)
*  Variable Depth Style
*  8-1/2 x 11 Style
*  8-1/2 x 11 Detail style
*  11 x 17 Style

6)  There are also options for different "Colors" - I clicked on the "Colors" item on the menu and saw:


The "Color" I used on the screens above is the "Color by Branch - Pastel (Default)."  The one I found interesting was the "X Chromosome Contributor" as shown below:


7)  On the menu, there is an item for "Chart Stats" - I clicked on that and saw (using my Windows Snipping Tool):


The Stats tool tells me the number of persons in my 12 generations, and itemizes each generation.  Because I have only 34.4% in Generation 11 and 21.9% in Generation 12, my tree for all 12 generations is 33.25% "Full," which they judge to be "Fair."  I am reasonably exhausted after 29 years of this!

There is a small bug in this program - I saw several persons in the 13th generation on my pedigree chart, and the Stats list has 13th generation on the list.

8)  The chart can be saved as a PDF file or an OPG file using icons on the line above the chart.  I tried saving the chart above as a PDF, and the chart was blank - it may have been too large, I don't know.

My hope was that I could print it out so I could read it, and then make the same chart with the FamilySearch Family Tree option, and see where I have to work in the FamilySearch Family Tree or in my RootsMagic tree.

9)  This seems to be a really useful program, and is fun to use.  There are enough program options to make it interesting.  I'm glad that they included a GEDCOM option rather than just using FamilySearch Family Tree.

One thing I don't like is that the chart uses the married name (the "last married"?) for the females in the first six generations of my pedigree chart.  I think that is because I have alternate names with the married names in my GEDCOM file.  The program must use the last name for the person rather than the birth name.

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Copyright (c) 2017, Randall J. Seaver

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