A Tour of Family Historian

You can change most aspects of any diagram type - including the colour schemes, the contents of each box (text and pictures), the number of generations to display, and many aspects of the layout. Save your settings as default settings, or as new custom diagram types.

Other genealogy programs call them 'Charts'. For us, charts are things you put on the wall. Family Historian's diagrams are designed to make wonderful wall charts (see below), but there is much more to them than that. They are fully interactive.

Here are just some of the things you can do with Family Historian diagrams:

Other genealogy programs force you to 'go' back to a special window, to enter and edit record details. Family Historian's Property Dialog is designed to be used in conjunction with, and to 'float in front of', other Family Historian windows. It doesn't matter if you are looking at the Records Window, the Diagram Window or any other window - if you can see a reference to an individual you can access their full record details, see everything you know about them (including all the sources for your information), and change any of it, without having to 'go' anywhere else. We have already seen that you can use the Property Dialog when using diagrams to browsing, or when working on your data using Diagram-Based Editing. In 'Pinned Mode', you simply click on any box on a diagram to see that person's details in the Property Dialog. If you change to any of these details, the diagram will update itself as soon as you click elsewhere (or press the 'Tab' key).

To find out more about the Property Dialog, click here.

If you have a picture that shows more than one person, you can insert the picture into your family tree file once and then link it to each of the people in the picture. You can even link each person to their own face in the picture. You do this by drawing stretchy boxes around each face to mark the linked area. When displaying a picture of a person in a diagram or report you can re-use this picture area, without ever having to 'crop' your pictures. It will also be available to be viewed as the 'Close-up' view of a person, when viewing pictures of them in the Property Dialog. Click here to find out more about how Family Historian handles pictures and other multimedia.

Family Historian's reports are highly configurable. You have fine-grained control over not only the content of each report, but also the style and layout. And you can make your changes 'on the fly' while viewing the report in the Report Window. This style of working makes it much easier to see what you are doing and get the results you want.

All reports (except reports based on queries which are handled separately) can be saved in HTML format, Rich Text Format (RTF) or text format.

Click here for information about Family Historian options.

Here is a selection of sample reports:

• Family Group Sheet (2nd page of report shown above)
• Individual Summary Report
• Ancestor Outline
• Descendant Outline
• Record Detail - Individual

We saw earlier how you could use diagrams to browse and explore your family tree data by clicking and expanding branches. You can do something very similar in the Records Window, to explore your data there too. Click here for more details.

Entering source citations (where you got your information from) is easy in Family Historian, using Automatic Source Citations. You have fine-grained control of how source citations print in reports (see the example of Source Options for the Family Group Sheet report). And you have easy access to source information within the Property Dialog. Click here for more information about Sources and Source Citations in Family Historian.

A query is a stored set of instructions for retrieving data, and for displaying it in a spreadsheet-like grid. For example, you might create a query to retrieve all the male ancestors of your spouse who died of a heart attack or whose cause of death is not known. Another query might retrieve everyone in your family tree file who was born or baptised in Durham. Family Historian comes with 28 queries when installed, but you can easily create your own.

Click here to find out more about Family Historian queries.

Merge/Compare

The Merge/Compare facility allows you to compare any 2 GEDCOM files (whether or not they were created by Family Historian) side-by-side. Family Historian will analyse each file and determine which records it thinks match. When matching Individuals it will take into account near relatives (parents, grandparents, spouses, etc).

You can use this feature just for comparison purposes, or you can let Family Historian merge one file into another (and optionally generate source citations to cite the first file as the source of the merged data). You can also override any aspect of the proposed merge, as much or as little as you like. Family Historian will show you exactly how it proposes to merge each record and each field, before you start any of it. Click here for more details about Merge/Compare.

Tools

Family Historian comes with tools to help you manage your family tree data. Here are some of them:

• A dialog to help you manage all links to external files - e.g. picture files (multimedia files can be embedded in your Family Historian data file, but most users prefer to keep them elsewhere and just store links to them instead).
• A dialog to help you manage and work with record identifiers (RINs).
• A facility to re-order out-of-sequence data in a file (e.g. for children, spouses, and events).
• A Backup-and-Restore facility that lets you backup data in a standard Winzip format
• A dialog to help you split a family tree file into two or more parts.
• A facility to help you create and work with 'Named Lists' of records (named lists are used for research purposes as ToDo lists, as bookmark lists, as lists of key people, and so on).