* Using Merge to Create Timelines in Reports

[admin]

By Frank Mathie
This is my first article, although I have been using Family Historian for just over a year having previously used The Master Genealogist. I suppose there may be many like me, who have not yet abandoned their previous software package completely, as it still has a couple of features they like that Family Historian doesnt support. My main one is TMG's use of timelines to provide a historical background to the events in an ancestors lifespan. I have not seen much discussion about timelines on this list, although I have noted that a few users have mentioned using TimeLine Creator as an 'add-on' to FH. I have looked at this, but I am not keen on the visual style of presentation it offers, preferring TMG's narrative/listing style (as well as it's 'already paid for' aspect!!)

I have attempted to use Family Historian to produce a workround and have come up with the following method, but wondered if anyone else has come up with a better option

As most of my Smith (stop laughing!) ancestors have lived, worked as coal miners and then died, in the same area of St Helens for the last two hundred or so years, the standard fare of 'born, appeared in the census as a miner , died ' type of reports are a bit drab to say the least. What I have done is create a new gedcom file named 'StHelens.ged'. I then created a single individual named 'Billy NoMates' with no other properties other than his name. I have then created a series of custom individual events for Billy such as 'Explosion at the Wood Pit, in Haydock'.I enter the date of the event '30 Nov 1844' and in the notes field I entered the details of the event such as '200 men and boys were killed in the explosion '

I then continued adding an event for each piece of local history I want to include in the timeline (approx 150 at present for my St Helens file, covering a span of 300 years).

Then when I want to run a timeline report on someone, I make a copy of my file, and then use merge/compare files from the menu to compare the copy file to my St Helens file. I then find my chosen individual, say my GG Grandfather, Edward Smith (born 1838, died of Typhus fever 1869 and not a lot else known) and match him with Billy NoMates in the St Helens file, The two individuals are merged and when I print off the individual report on , my report tells me that he was 6 years old at the time of the Wood Pit Explosion, aged 16 when the new 'Legh Armes Hotel' was built opposite Newton station in 1854 when Messrs McCorquadale and Company took over the old one, and aged 30 when St. Helens became a borough with the four townships of Eccleston, Parr, Sutton and Windle etc, etc . With a bit of twiddling with the layout I get a very presentable report. I don't know if timelines are a feature in the pipeline for Family Historian, so this method will do me in the meantime and cuts dowm my reliance on my old program and the need to double input new material. In fact, I am so peased with it, I am currently working on a WW1 file (with an individual named Tommy Gunn, naturally enough). My only problem is that I can't decide if this is a workround to overcome a shortcoming in Family Historian, or proof of how powerful and flexible a piece of software it is :0)

Incidentally, TMG is also quite strong on a feature just introduced into Family Historian, namely Narrative reports. It's sentence structure is very flexible and can be changed to read however the user chooses. This is something I imagine will be coming along in Family Historian at somepoint, but Rome wasn't built in a day so I will continue to being grateful for the updates as they are issued and look forward to when I can do everything I want from within Family Historian. Some of Family Historians reports may not be as fully featured as we might like at present, but they will come, and overall, it's diagram based editing and multi media support by themselves put it miles ahead of the competition in my book

Thanks to all Frank

[wapentake]

A big thank-you from me for this post, which directly resulted in me buying 'Family Historian 4' over competitor products.
Narrative timelines were a feature I definitely wanted to use in recording my family history, so I downloaded the trial version of FH4 and followed Frank's instructions above.
I needed to tweak a few things here and there, but I'm pleased to say that I managed to create a merged individual report which included local history events which I had set up in a separate Gedcom file.
Cracking stuff, Frank!