Tutorial on charting

Family History Charting

STYLES AND TYPES OF GENEALOGICAL CHARTS

Genealogical Charts are presented in a number of forms:

Ancestry-based
- Rectilinear Tree - a tree starting with a person and showing their parents and their parent's parents usually aligning all the persons of one generation as a column or row of the chart. It can be produced in 4 orientations; left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. Sometimes, it can show siblings at each generation.
- Fan or Radial Tree - a series of concentric arcs or circles with the youngest person placed at the centre. Each next arc out from the centre has the parents of the persons on the next inner arc. This becomes quite unreadable as the number of generations exceed about 10.
- Timeline - like the ancestry-based rectilinear tree but the scale in one direction represents time and each person is represented as a bar positioned in time extending from their birth date to their death date rather than the traditional text box in the rectilinear tree. It is usual for time to be left-to-right and for the persons to be sorted according to their birth or death dates.
Descendancy-based
- Rectilinear Tree - a tree starting with a person and showing their children and their children's children usually aligning all the persons of one generation as a column or row of the chart. It can be produced in 4 orientations; left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. It usually shows the (spouse) partner's information.
- Fan or Radial Tree - a series of concentric arcs or circles with the oldest person placed at the centre. Each next arc out from the centre has the children of the persons on the next inner arc. This becomes quite unreadable as the number of generations exceed about 5 as there are many more entries because of large families and some branches that terminate early.
- Timeline - like the descendancy-based rectilinear tree but the scale in one direction represents time and each person is represented as a bar positioned in time extending from their birth date to their death date rather than the traditional text box in the rectilinear tree. It is usual for time to be left-to-right and for the persons to be sorted according to their birth or death dates. The difference between the descendancy-based and ancestry-based timeline charts is the choice of persons represented on the chart.
Combined Ancestry and Descendancy
- Hourglass - this chart is the combination of the rectilinear styles of an ancestry-based chart and a descendancy-based chart focussed on the one person. For example, a bottom-to-top ancestry-based rectilinear chart attached to focus person of a top-to-botom descendancy-based rectilinear chart to give the hourglass shape that is the name of this style of report.
- Timeline - this chart is the combination of the timeline styles of an ancestry-based chart and a descendancy-based chart focussed on the one person. It is usually created for a small number of generations of ancestors and descendants (say 3 in each case). In this style it is possible to draw lines at a time to see which relatives were living at the same time and may have known one another.
- All-in-One - this chart is the combination of extended rectilinear styles of an ancestry-based chart and a descendancy-based chart focussed on the one person. Unlike the hourglass chart this style attempts to present all the descendants of the ancestors on one chart. This can become very large and entangled when there are a lot of multiply-inter-related families.
- Other Compound - one you have the ability generate charts, edit charts, and to combine charts, then it is up to your imagination. This area of charting is most important when you have explicit concepts that want to explore (like all persons associated with a village, all cousins of a person, the transfer of land ownership or other estates from generation to generation, other kinds of cultural relationships that govern choice of marriage partners).