Telling the story of your family in a Book

Charting Companion is the only program[1] that can create a book from your genealogy data, and output it in a format that is truly compatible with your word processor: MS Word, WordPerfect, Open Office, etc. There are several benefits to this approach.

First page of a Descendant Book (aka "Register")

You can fine-tune the font type, font size, margins, page layout, etc. to suit your tastes. You can add photos to the book, in addition to the ones that Charting Companion automatically includes for you.

Charting Companion embeds special indexing codes throughout the book. These codes are unseen by the reader, but they guide the word processor into creating an automatic index at the end of the book. This is important because, as you change the format of the book, the page numbers will change and will need to be re-calculated. The word processor does this simply and quickly, giving you the option of a single- double- or multiple column index.

Three-column index with multiple page references for each person

The index includes years of birth and death, to differentiate between all those "John Smiths". Women are indexed under both their maiden and married names. The index can be configured so that surnames are only shown once; only the given names appear of all the people with the same surname. This improves legibility, and reduces the number of pages.

Charting Companion also embeds special "footnote" codes for your source citations. This provides maximum flexibility for the word processor to place the footnotes at the bottom of the page (or the end of the book), a complex balancing of text and footnotes that the word processor will perform for you.

If you want to take your family history to a printing company to be published as a bound book, your printer will need the special format created by Charting Companion.
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[1] Other programs can output RTF, but do not include an index and footnote codes which are required if you want flexibility.

Bevels and gradients - how to spice up your charts

The Charting Companion programs offer three flavors of color - regular, gradient and bevel.

The gradient option creates a nice, smooth blend that softens the color, as in this example:

Gradient color

The bevel option draws a beveled edge around each square, and adds a nice textured gradient in the center.

Beveled color

Both options provide eye-catching enhancements that are a colorful way of telling the story of your family.

Top-down, Left-to-right, what's the difference?

The traditional way of displaying a Descendant tree is "Top-down", from top to bottom. This is also called the "English Monarchy" style. Here is an example, my maternal grand-father's gang:

Descendants - Top-down

Left-to-right

This format is well understood. However, it takes up more room. Our Charting Companion program offers another format, the Left-to-right. This format can be twice as compact as the Top-down, even when the same font size is used, and the same information is included.

At a family reunion, the Top-down format can be spread horizontally across a wall.

The Left-to-right format can be broken up into multiple panels: create a separate chart for each son and daughter of the patriarch or original ancestor, and display them side-by-side.

Left-to-right uses half the paper: more economical, faster to assemble when tiling multiple pages. Also cheaper at the print shop when you're doing poster-size!

Ancestor chart with siblings - the World's only!

The Charting Companion program has the unique ability to display a chart that includes the siblings of your Ancestors (uncles & aunts). The variable and unpredictable number of siblings makes this a challenge that no other graphics program has solved [1].

In the following chart of Mary Constance Colquhoun (my Scottish grandmother's family), it is interesting to see how they followed traditional naming patterns.

The Colquhoun-Miller families

 Note the repeating 'Robert', 'Alexander', 'Martha', 'Jane' from the father's side, and 'Jackson', 'Violet' on the mother's side. The first-born son appears to be named 'Alexander'. Did the first Robert (m. Mary Watt) have an older brother Alexander? This bears investigating.

Note also how the second-born son  in grandma's family was diplomatically named 'Jackson' after the oldest of the mother's (Mary Miller) side.

I can still remember my old grandmother telling me the story, in her Scottish brogue, of her "wee brother Alexander" who put a precious silver teapot, a family heirloom, directly on the wood stove in the old country. The teapot soon melted into beads of silver skating across the stove. Things were grim in the Colquhoun household that evening.

Note: The colors in the chart above were added manually. Charting Companion does give you the ability of assigning custom colors to individuals in your family tree (see 16 May 2011 post).

The display of siblings adds richness and depth to family tree charts. You too can display your ancestors' siblings with Charting Companion.
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[1] Family Tree Maker has the option to "Display Siblings for Primary Individual", which only shows the subject's siblings, not for other generations.

Embroidery stitching

For the past few months I have been immersed in developing an Embroidery module for our Charting Companions. Our customers will be able to stitch a family tree on a T-shirt, which they can proudly wear at family reunions.

The embroidered charts are fan-shaped. They come in quarter-circle, half- or full-circle. They are available as Ancestor charts, or Descendant charts. Click here for actual examples.

The project was quite a challenge. In order to stitch a letter, the thread has to follow a pattern called a "satin stitch", a left-to-right zig-zag that completely fills the area of the letter.

Digital embroidery can be stitched on home sewing machines made by companies like Singer, Janome, Husqvarna, Brother, Pfaff, and many others. You can also have your family treee stitched at the local embroidery shop on machines made by Barudan, Tajima or Toyota.

The stitches made by embroidery machines are limited as to length, typically 12 mm (1/2"). To cover a span longer than 12 mm requires breaking it down into multiple steps.

Letters are created by drawing a line through a series of dots that form the outline of the letter, sort of like "connect-the-dots". This forms a polygon or multi-sided shape. Covering a polygon with a zig-zag stitch may seem intuitively obvious, but it is more complicated than it seems. Starting at the foot of the letter 'A', for example, seems simple. What do you do when you arrive at the horizontal bar? You can't continue zig-zagging horizontally, because it will require too wide a span. If you constrain yourself to the same width until you rejoin the rest of the vertical part, how do you remember to come back to the horizontal bar?

Very tricky. Design decisions which make sense for some letters, turn out to fail for other letters.

Anyway, after multiple false starts, we are pleased to offer our customers the ability to proudly display their research on a vest or T-shirt. Great for family reunions and genealogy conferences!

The embroidery feature is available for all Charting Companions: Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Geni.com, FamilySearch.org, OneGreatFamily, Ancestral Quest. For PAF, use PAF*Embroider.