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Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Finally, a Descendants Chart I Can Use! Thank You, MyHeritage!

Since I've been doing descendancy research of my 4th great-grandparents, I've been searching for a way to display the results graphically.  The endless list of descendants is not inviting but is searchable!  The typical "Family View" on online family trees and in genealogy software doesn't enable more than 5 generations and it is impossible to get them on one screen.  The 6-generation descendant charts in software are rectangular and often many feet wide and less than 12 inches high.

I remembered today that MyHeritage has a "Sun chart" option.  Can I use that to display, say, six generations of descendants and get it on one page?  I tried it for my 4th great-grandparents Humphrey White (1757-1814) and Sibyl Kirby (1764-1848) of Glocester, Rhode Island  Here is the result:


How cool is that?  Except it's difficult to read the names.  And I wish I had photos of everyone on the chart in MyHeritage.  The really cool things on this chart, for me:

1)  I can see where I have work to do - which descendants am I missing?  Probably the families at 2 to 5 o'clock on the chart and at 10 o'clock on the chart.

2)  It tells me that there are 300 people on this chart!  I can count how many are in each generation too.  On the image above, the number is right under the label "Descendants of Humphrey White and Sibyl Kirby" in the middle of the chart.

3)  I can use this chart in my blog posts about descendants of my 4th great-grandparents!

How did I create this chart?  It was very easy - of course I have to have the tree in MyHeritage.  Then:

1)  Go to the "Family tree" menu and click on the "Print charts and books" item:


2)  Select the type o chart you want - I chose "Sun chart" and chose "Descendants:"

Further down the page I chose the "Main person" item and typed in "Humphrey White" and it let me select the right one.  Then the system filled in the title of the chart ( and included the spouse too!).  I chose "Years of birth and death" for the "Facts for individuals."  For "Generations" I chose 6 generations:


3)  I clicked the orange "Preview chart" button and within seconds, the chart appeared:

At the top of the page, the system told me it was 6718 x 7363 pixels (about 22" x 24" at 300 DPI), and 2.03 megabytes.  At 100% size it is a very large chart - perhaps 11 pages high (the image at the top is a 9% magnification!).

Unfortunately, this family tree on MyHeritage is now four months out-of-date and I've been working on this line, so I will need to upload a new GEDCOM file soon with my latest tree people and do the chart again when I do my descendants list for Humphrey and Sibyl (Kirby) White.

Easy-peasy.  Just what I needed!  Thank you, MyHeritage!!

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Disclosure: I receive a complimentary subscription to MyHeritage, and gave received other material consideration in past years. I uploaded my autosomal DNA raw data to their DNA product. This does not affect my objective analysis of MyHeritage products.

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2021/08/finally-descendants-chart-i-can-use.html

Copyright (c) 2021, Randall J. Seaver

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2 comments:

  1. This is great! I did not know this even existed. I've been using a commercial product to generate descendancy fan charts. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Am I reading the article correctly? This chart is unreadable? Is it possible to do a half circle larger and readable then paste then together?

    ReplyDelete