It’s Saturday Night again –

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  Have you made a pedigree fan chart recently?  Show us yours!  How did you do it?  Which program did you use?

While I rarely print a fan chart, I use the Fan Chart view on FamilySearch as my default view. I tend to leve the coloring option set to ‘family lines’.

My husband likes the view with ‘Birth Place’ colored. Since most of my tree was in the US prior to the revolutionary war, I didn’t think this view would be very helpful.

While my HARDING line does go back to Canada, the coloring on the above chart is a little deceiving. Several of these people are colored for ‘British Colonial America’ while the majority of my 7th generation ancestors are colored for United States. Since the coloring is based on what is entered for the birth place, it is dependent on how users enter places prior to the revolutionary war.

The view that shows ‘sourcing’ has helped me see which ancestors need better sourcing on the FamilySearch tree.

When I use the ‘Stories’ option, it shows me that very few stories have been uploaded for my ancestors. However, the ‘photos’ view is very helpful. Since I have photos from both of my grandparents, I need to make sure they are preserved by uploading them to the FamilySearch site. Thus, the Photos Fan chart is a guide.

While my current ‘Research Helps’ fan chart is pretty white, it had a lot of ‘orange’ about a week ago. Thanks to this chart, I was able to see ‘data problems’. Since I corrected them, the ‘orange’ is now gone.

Since my RootsMagic software includes the ability to print FAN CHARTS, I decided to see the options available for printing these charts. Like the FS charts, there are several options for color coding the RM fan charts. Below, is a chart based on lineage.

Since I have used color coding for my various lines, I could print a fan chart showing those colors.

The RM fan chart can also be printed with coloring by gender, coloring for the X-Chromosome line and coloring for the Y-Chromosome line or without coloring,

Besides coloring, I can switch the generations. If I switch to 9 generations, I can see many of the ‘holes’ in my tree.

If I switch the 9 generation chart to ‘color coding’ my holes show up as light blue.

While RootsMagic and FamilySearch offer several ways to ‘create’ a FAN chart I likely will never actually print one.