Family Tree Chart location Algorithm

[col48]

Drawing a family tree looks easy until the complexities of a real, sometimes messy, family are encountered. It isn't the actual drawing - it's the deciding where on the 'paper' each individual is to be put so that their family-as-child doesn't look too spread out and likewise their families-as-parent.

None of the commercial family tree packages does exactly what I want, so I have my own program running off a database of my own design.

But drawing a family tree chart is by no means straightforward when relationships can be very complex and the number of people very large. What I have devised works up to a point but has grown like topsy and needs a fundamental redesign. Starting from (basically) a list of individuals and their parents, I want to get an x and y for everyone such that nuclear families cluster and marriage partners are adjacent - as far as reasonably practicable on both scores.

I have found on the internet a paper by Coulson and Glasspool (The RAGs Software: Pedigree Layout Algorithm) published by the Advanced Computation Laboratory, Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 2000 which at first sight looks promising, but the key assumptions they make are not true of my data, viz:
1. Each Individual can be given a unique generation number such that their children all have the generation number which is one more than that individual.
2. Where one parent of an individual is known, so is the other.

Both of these could be got round, I think, by the use of dummy individuals to act as placeholders, but this is messy both in computation and in presentation, so I'd rather not do it. And I'm not sure this will get round assumption 1 in all cases.

What's more, I think there may be implicit assumptions which are also not true of my data. What I want to cater for would allow for all these:
11. Any individual may be married several times, as may any of the spouses.
12. Any individual may have children whose other parent is not one of the spouses of that individual.
13. An individual may marry his first cousin.
14. An individual may marry his/her first cousin once (or twice!!) removed.
15. The people to be charted may not all be related to one another, ie two or more trees may be needed on the same chart.
16. Approximate contemporaries should have approximately the same y
17. There may be no common ancestor and no common descendant for any tree and no one person who is the focus of a tree, ie everyone is an ancestor or descendant of that person or the spouse or sibling of one.

So I want an algorithm! The few commercial packages and websites I have seen do not seem to have solved this one - one administrator went so far as to say that a GEDCOM file which allowed no 13 above must be invalid.

Does anyone have any ideas? I can't be the first to have sought an answer!

Sorry about the long post, but at least it gets it off my chest!

[Anne in Carlisle]

Sorry - I don't really understand the technicality of the question. However, reading through the things you want to show I am confident that Family Historian would do that for you. In building diagrams you can add as many 'other' families to your initial diagram as you want. You can certainly have people married to cousins etc. You can have them marrying multiple times, to each other and other people. You can show them as divorced or an unmarried couple. You can have them also having a child with an unknown parent as well as lots of other marriages.

I have dealt with a tree, using FH, in which a woman marries three brothers one after the other and has children with them all. She is also distantly related to their family. All this can be shown in the diagram!

Anne

[Caroline]

13. An individual may marry his first cousin.

Sorry about the long post, but at least it gets it off my chest!

Well, Family Historian, copes quite happily with my grandparents who were first cousins!! Even though one of them is stepchild to her father-in-law's second wife!!

[WendyPusey]

I've used Family Tree Maker and have drawn trees that included cousins marrying, women with 5 husbands and several children by different partners. There are also divorced and seperated couples too. All are displayed properly in the charts in FTM.

[col48]

Thanks, Anne for your quick reply. (and others who have replied while I was composing this!)

Firstly, Family Historian.
FH looks like a very nice product, but it has three drawbacks for me - it hides the way it stores its data, it is fully GEDCOM-compliant (when I last investigated GEDCOM-5.5, my data would not all fit its standard fields without a lot of duplication) and it is a Windows program (I could possibly run it under Wine, but it is a risk). Much of the fun is writing the program myself - I then know what it can do, and if I think of something I want to add then I can choose to do it.

How does FH show in a chart all the people in this scenario? A1 marries A2; they have children B1 and B2; B1 has child C1, B2 has child C2, C1 has child D1, D1 has child E1, E1 marries C2. And how does it show a person who has several spouses, one of whom is themselves married several times? That's just me being curious!

Secondly, my basic question -
It's really just how to decide exactly where to put the individuals on a (very large) page. I want to write down the process someone could go through by hand to draw the chart (actually doing it by hand would take weeks and be out of date as soon as someone else was added!), allowing for all the peculiar relationships, so that I can automate it in my program. If there is a solution out there, I'd be happy to use it - it's not for any commercial use - solely my own, but I am not convinced there is one openly available. There could be thousands of people in the tree.

[col48]

Caroline
I had to draw that one on a piece of paper. I haven't got one like that, but I think my existing program would cope with it. I have got a chain of A marries B marries C marries D with it not (at one time) being clear which of the next generation were of which relationship. Not difficult to deal with. But what if D subsequently marries A? How do you show that on a piece of paper? Of course, when I say "marry", this could just be beget children together.

Isn't it mind-bending when the skeletons all fall out of the cupboard together (probably holding hands when they do!)?

[Caroline]

EDIT: I was doing this to answer your first query!!




Or if you prefer:



You can adjust the levels pretty much as you wish. You can also switch the ribbons on and off, hide duplicated branches etc.

[Caroline]

I didn't quite describe it correctly.

My grandparents were first cousins!! One of the great grandmothers is stepchild to her father-in-law's second wife!!




And just to add a complication, the great great grandfather married two sisters:




And should I mention that John Gillett and Susannah Gillett were second cousins? I haven't attempted to add that relationship to the diagram as it is rather late.


The two trees were drawn by adding mini ancestor and descendant trees to the basic diagram. The FH software is pretty powerful when it come to drawing diagrams.

[col48]

Caroline
Thanks for the diagrams - I prefer the second version in your 21:00 post, although I would only have one copy of the C2 and E2 boxes. In the later post, at a cost of one line crossing from one side to the other I would eliminate all the duplication of boxes. So you see I like things drawn the way I like them, not to someone else's ideas! Hence the whole thread.

[Anne in Carlisle]

I can see you like to make your own programs etc Col. However, personally I am not capable of doing that and also I would much prefer spending my time actually doing family research than computer programming! Each to their own, I guess!

I have noticed on the Family Historian User Group site that there are some members who are more interested in actually playing with the program itself. While I (and others) use the program at a slightly more basic level according to our needs. I'm not criticising your choice, just pointing out differences in approach.

Anne

[col48]

Anne

I like both, but I regard the program as a tool. I get frustrated when a tool doesn't do what I want it to do. Differences in approach are valuable - they can lead to different insights to get past the obstacles some of which get documented on this forum. They can also lead to more searching scrutiny of hypotheses which should lead to more robust results.

I am not interested in playing with a serious program (ie not a game!) but, of course, those who do may help improve the program for others. Likewise, those who do serious research improve the chances of the rest of us achieving their more modest goals, either by tree extension or by getting more records online or by suggesting new lines of research.

On a forum like this, no-one gains by (negative) criticism but there is everything to gain by sharing issues and problems, which someone else may already have solved - in principle even if not in specific detail.

I have read some of your contributions to other threads, and the contributions of some of the other prolific posters. You are clearly very experienced and enjoy helping others benefit from that experience, and I salute you for it (oh dear, that sounds patronising and it really isn't meant to be). I may chip in a little from time to time but I don't have a lot of time to devote to the art.

This is getting rather philosophical! On with the job......

[Anne in Carlisle]

LOL, Col. I understand!

Anne