Question from Earle:
I, like many (I assume), have ancestors who married first or second cousins. This causes havoc when trying to create reports because the same people show up in different lines creating an endless loop. Is there a simple solution?
Our answer:
Earle, I actually think you're the only one with this situation….Kidding….Sorry about that….
You're right, when cousins marry, and you're looking at a their child's pedigree, the same ancestors will appear in different parts of the chart. UNLESS, you turn on the "Don't Repeat Duplicate Lines" option.
Look at the pedigree chart below. The starting person, Jonathan Smith, was the child of two first cousins who married each other. Jonathan's parents had the same grandparents. The grandparents are highlighted in red. But take a closer look at Gertrude's grandparents. Below their names is the phrase "Duplicate line. See Chart 1, Pos 8/9)". Because I've turned on the "Don't Repeat Duplicate Lines", the pedigree chart will only follow the grandparents' line once.
To turn on this option, in the Pedigree Chart's Report Options, click on the Format tab and select "Don't Repeate Duplicate Lines".
(Click on the picture to enlarge.)
I’ve been breaking my brains on a similar issue – how to display in a chart or graph in a clearly understandable manner the complicated relationships of several (many) early Colonial family sets. With first wives dying in childbirth and old widowers being married to old widows and children of first (or 2nd or 3rd) marriages marrying to their step-parent’s earlier spouse’s previous marriage’s children (and one man marrying his step-sister who was also his mother’s first cousin), the visualization gets daunting. Especially when the same Given name and Surname repeat. Also a case of three siblings marrying three siblings – and resulting double (and triple) cousins later marrying. The most complicated in my fdb is a ‘family’ that had ten total spouses, 45-some children and cousin and step relationships among many. I’d like to be able to see and show the progression of young couples, evolving to mixed-families, through to the last couple alive and get a sense of how they ‘knew’ each of their tangled offspring and they each met major life changes. I can list each fa/ma/sn/dau/aunt/uncle/nCmR from each individual to each other, but such a list does not show the whole picture. Yet the people involved knew ‘who they were to’ everyone else in the village as they lived and died.
I looked at the “Knot System”
http://www.knotsystem.dk/defi.htm
which assigns integers to each person and develops codes to connect a starting person to all others, but that does not seem to handle the multiple marriages or intermarried step-kids in a straight-forward way. (Does the Legacy relationship calculator use this or an algorithmically equivalent scheme?)
And then there is the “directed graph” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
which uses ‘nodes’ and connecting lines, whose mathematical rules might be adapted to family connections, but would require dimensionality to the ‘edges’ – (father/mother/son/daughter/marriage, dates, places) and an automated way to chart the results. Before I learn a new branch of applied mathematics and code my own program, are there any others who have tackled this issue?
Challenge?
Bill Hathaway