Family Book Creator – Manual Edits

As previously mentioned in a couple of my prior posts, I have been working on a family book for my sister-in-law’s family. I want to cover some of the manual edits that I did for this book. These modifications were done using a Windows PC and Word. 

Family book creator is a very powerful program; however, the author of this program can’t anticipate every user’s desires when it comes to publishing a book. The book has the ability to print enhanced Pedigree Charts which displays the graphic representation of their direct-line ancestors and the children of the couple. This option is basically an all or nothing type of feature. Either you have it for every married couple, or you don’t have any at all. Since, I want something different; then, I must do some manual edits to remove the ones I don’t want.  

I can also include Portraits for people. Again, it’s sort of an all or nothing type of situation. If I attached a photo to the person, it will print. I could have unattached the portraits for individuals in FTM that I don't want to print in the book, however, I found doing it in the book was easier for me. I am printing a descendant book to include 6 generations of the family, this is the entire family. Before any of my edits, it was 593 pages long, my finished product is 441 pages long. This may not seem like a lot, however not printing 152 pages, can make a big difference in the price of a book. Keep in mind that when generating a book with two sided printing, the book will start every generation on it's own page, and it's an odd number page, so that the new generation will appear on the top side of the page. Thus you may end up with some blank even pages before a new generation is started. This is okay.

My goal: To have the enhanced Pedigree chart for the family of the starting person and Generation 1 (their children) only. To have portraits for the starting person, generations 1 and generation 2 only. I don't need the rest, because I don't have a picture for every individual and I don't want to offend anyone by including or excluding their picture. Your goal may be different than mine.

Therefore, starting at the end of the book, with the last person in the book, I will remove the enhanced pedigree charts I don’t want, along with an extra line. 

I click anywhere on the last person’s pedigree chart. In the left upper corner of the chart an enhanced plus should appear. Right click on the enhanced plus to bring up a drop-down menu. Then select “Delete Table”. This will place your cursor on the line above the person’s reference number, press the [delete] key on your keyboard to delete this line. This is an extra line, that really isn’t needed, there is still spacing between the two family sections.

I continue in this manner moving up the report, deleting the enhanced pedigree charts. You may notice that you don’t always have to click to bring up the enhance plus. This is because you haven't click out of the active screen. Just continue deleting the table and then delete the blank line. You may also notice that you can't always see the reference number of the person you are working on, don’t worry, just press the delete key once to delete the blank line and then move onto the next pedigree chart. 

If you goof up, don’t forget to select the undo button in word to undo your last action. You will find it above the main menu, it's the backwards circle arrow shown next tot he floppy disk.

As I continued to work my way up the book, I came across some portraits I wanted to delete. If you click near the portrait, an enhanced plus should appear. Right click on the enhanced plus bring up the drop-down menu and select “Delete Table” to remove the portrait and the name below the portrait.

However, you will notice that the photo is gone, however the words didn’t move over and fill in the space. This is because there is another table creating this paragraph that needs to be adjusted. Thus, click in the paragraph next to the blank space and you will see an enhanced plus located slightly above and to the left of the reference number of this person. Left click on it to highlight the entire paragraph, where you can easily see the empty space. Next, gently hover your mouse over the spot where the left white space touches the gray space, you will see a double arrow, then click, hold, and drag the gray space to all the way to the right. The words should move with the gray space. If you make an error, you can always undo and then try again. 

I had to use a slightly different method if multiple children had pictures associated with them. I could delete each individual picture using my method. However, the table for the words, was a bigger table and included multiple children. Thus, I had to delete all their individual pictures first and then I was able to modify the table containing the words, by sliding the gray space to the right. This fixed all the children's verbiage at the same time.

One final challenge. If the last child or children of the previous family had individual photos, the table might include both their individual verbiage and the enhanced pedigree chart of the next family unit. Thus, you are unable delete the table for the enhanced pedigree chart by itself without deleting everything, because it’s part of the verbiage table. You will need to delete the rows of this enhanced pedigree chart. Then you can delete the individual photos and finally move the gray box to the right to expand the words. 

Thus, you will need to highlight the rows that make up the enhanced pedigree chart.  Left Click on the space right above the reference number. Click your mouse and hold, drag, and highlight moving your mouse up the page, slowly. If you highlight the words for the person above the chart, you went to far, bring it down until only the chart is highlighted. Release the mouse button.  Then right click, select “Delete Rows”, then select “delete entire rows”. Then press Delete if there appears to be an extra blank line remaining. 

This might seem like a big undertaking; however, you are basically repeating your steps over and over again. Thus, take your time.  You can always save your work as you finish deleting a table and before moving to a new table. You may want to make a copy of your file before you start. If you goof up too big, you can always go back to the beginning. Also, the undo button is your friend, just press it until you get back to a point where you can start over. Save your work, especially if you are going to take a break. Even if it only a short bathroom break, save your work!

One final step needs to be done when you have completely, removed all the enhanced pedigree charts and portraits you don’t want, you will need to have the document, reindexed and the table of contents needs to be updated. 

Press, Ctrl + A to highlight the entire document. Then you need to press F9. I was given a popup box to either select “Update Page #’s Only” or “Update Entire Table”. I chose to update the entire table. 

My biggest advice, is practice these skills. Try running a small practice book. Practice your deleting skills and then update the entire table. Verify that the page numbers are now index properly and the table of contents are correct. 

Don't be afraid to run test reports by experimenting by selecting and deselecting features. Even though I suggest making as many changes within your FTM file before creating a book, you still may need to make some modifications once the book generates. In my opinion, this is why FBC is such a wonderful tool, I can customize it to what I want.

Good luck in your book project!

How Far to build out one’s trees?

 

In many of the Genealogy FaceBook groups I belong, the big question is how far out do you build a tree and should I have separate trees for my family.

Let’s talk about the number of trees. When I started my genealogy journey, was I unmarried and thus I created one tree. I decided I would include not only my direct line, but my ancestor’s children. I started before computers, and was using paper forms and three-ring binders. This method worked good in the beginning because I really wasn’t finding a lot of information.

Then came the personal computer and genealogy software. I still didn’t build down my trees too much, being newer at this, I wasn’t always sure if I had the correct children. Then the internet was born, and more and more information are available online. Also, DNA came into the picture.

I have morphed into three main trees. My family, my husband’s family, and my half-siblings father’s family. There is overlap between the trees. My siblings and their descendants are in both my family tree and their father’s family tree. My husband, parents and our children and grandchild are in both my family tree and my husband’s family tree.

How far out do I build my tree? A lot farther than I did when I started. If you look at a family group sheet, it has both the husband and wife along with their parents. Thus, I enter that information into my tree too. Why do I include the spouse’s parents? Basically, to see if in-laws are marrying into my family in different places. I have had siblings marry cousins of mine. The cousins aren't necessarily siblings, some are and some aren’t. I have had an aunt married one gentleman and her niece marry her stepson. So, I like to figure out when in-laws are related to each other. 

I also, figure out all the descendants of my ancestors. Reason: these make great books, such as the “Goodwin Family”, where I would start with my oldest known Goodwin Ancestor and include all their descendants. Another Reason: those living descendants are the one’s taking DNA test and are showing up as your matches. I don’t know these people and thus the names are not always recognized because names change whenever a female descendant gets married. Thus, the more people I have in my family tree, the easier it is to figure out who my DNA matches are. 

Thus, DNA is a major reason to have one tree. For example, I had my half-siblings tested, now which tree do I attach their DNA to? Their tree which only has their father’s line or my tree which has our mother’s ancestry in? I can only attach the results to one tree. I guess I could have them take two test (waste of money) and attach one test to one tree and the other test to the other tree. However, I have created a special DNA Tree where I merge their father’s tree to my tree to create a DNA tree. At first, I was only including a couple of generations of descendants in this merged tree. I am now at the point; I almost need to merge our two complete trees and just work from there. I am hesitant, because I am the home person in my tree and my oldest brother is the home person of my sibling’s tree. It does get confusing when I look at someone and I see no direct relationship. My DNA tree is not a working tree, I don’t make changes in this tree. I recreate this tree about once a year and attach all the DNA tests that I manage in Ancestry to their profiles in the tree. 

So back to our questions: Should I create separate trees for my family? If you create one tree for each of your grandparent’s think of overlap in the trees. You for example, would be in each tree, all their descendants would be in multiple trees, unless you are going to end the tree at your grandparent level. However, think of all the people who will be missing from these trees if you don’t include them. Plus, when your cousin ask you how are you related to so and so? How hard is that going to be to figure out, or how easy it would be to calculate if they are in your tree. 

Plus, family trees are not like trees at all but more like spider webs where they connect in more than one spot. A person, from your maternal grandfather’s family might marry into your paternal grandmother’s family. What about in-law siblings where one marries into your maternal grandfather’s family and the other into your paternal grandmother’s family. If the trees are separate, you might not see this. Have you seen funeral announcements of old, where they list everyone who attended a funeral, you might see your paternal grandmother’s first cousin attending your maternal grandfather’s 2nd cousin’s funeral, why? Because the first cousin’s wife is the sister of the 2nd cousin’s husband. 

So how far out do you build a tree? For me, I build out as far as I can. I include the parents of spouses who marry into my family. I have expanded some of those spouse’s family lines to figure out if they are related to others with the same surname. I include all my distant cousins, because we share a common ancestor. I even include spouses of spouses? If my relative’s spouse was married before or after being married to my relative, I include their spouse too. I include their children with said spouse. Reason: Some families view their family different then blood lines, I have seen step-children listed as children in census records and obituaries. By placing them into their proper place, I will know exactly how we are related and why I don’t match DNA with someone. 

Does this make for big trees, yes it does. However, with computers, handling such big trees is no problem at all. I usually only work on a branch at a time, print reports for only a branch at a time. Thus, I am usually working only on a small subset of my big tree at any given time.

For a little background, my trees are created using Family Tree Maker (FTM) a genealogy software program that resides on my computer. I can merge trees, export branches of my tree to share with family members (this doesn’t remove them from my tree). A genealogy software program is a very powerful tool. If you are using only Ancestry for your tree, you won’t have all these capabilities. Thus, if you start with multiple trees, you won’t be able to merge them without purchasing a genealogy software program. Keep in mind, that all software genealogy programs don’t talk directly with Ancestry and thus you will need to export a GEDCOM (genealogy file) from Ancestry to load into your software program. You will lose all your images. However, FTM talks to Ancestry and you won’t lose your images. 

So, whether you are a beginner or been doing genealogy for many years, its always good to review how you are doing genealogy and think about how far to build out your tree and how many tree’s should you have.

Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!