* Advice on Best Report Formats

[philmcleod]

I am proposing to publish my research to give to family in the form of a professionally printed tree and book.
Does anyone have good advice for the best way to do this as there are so many options such as:
Ancestors by generation or
Descendants by generation or
A mixture by perhaps doing Ancestors by generation for each Great grandparent and then descendants by generation for each
Descendants reports seem to produce duplication as spouses appear from both sides.
I wish to include recent cousins, great uncles and aunts etc somehow as well as direct line ancestors
Any clues on a good book format would be much appreciated
Thanks

[wulliam]

I posted about this on another forum a few years ago: https://www.familytreeforum.com/content ... ook-format

Whilst reports have their undoubted uses, being able to write as much or as little about any person or theme, and being able to format that work in precisely the way you wish, is very important - to me, at least.

If you just want to get the facts across, reports will do that for you, but if you want to engage people who might not be interested otherwise then I would suggest that you write a more free-flowing book full of anecdotes and relevant social history.

Just my tuppence-worth...I hope you're pleased with whatever you eventually decide!

[philmcleod]

Thanks - I do see your point but unfortunately for all sorts of reasons our families are generally lacking in really interesting information and we have virtually no photographs or stories. All that I have is the information gained from certificates, census FMP, Ancestry etc together with one army record. No particular section of the family are really noteworthy so it is just a case of where ancestors came from and what they did.
Thanks anyway

[AdrianBruce]

The trouble is - as you have found with the duplicated spouses - just about any type of report that you specify will either miss people out or, as it grows wider, create duplicates. You either have to manually edit the result to remove duplicates (a pain because of the disruption) or live with it.

My concern - and I apologise because I'm going to sound picky - is that if your story is "generally lacking in really interesting information" - why are you proposing to spend money professionally printing what will seem like a set of lists? (Like I said, I apologise!) I've only written two lines so far (my wholly paternal line and my mother's paternal line) and I wrote those in MS Word as free text. What I did was write around the basic facts - so if someone was a linen weaver in Dundee, then write up about the linen industry there, about how the factories were split between spinning and weaving, etc., etc. If someone worked on the railways, then write a bit about the lines in their area - see what Wikimedia can provide in the way of images that can be used for free (with acknowledgements). If someone was in WW1 and you have their Army record, can you work out what battles he was close to and write something about those? The key, I think, is to write about their world.

Yes, this is much harder work than pressing a button and squirting the text out, but I would really encourage you to sort out something that (a) honours your family (because they are worth it) and (b) is worth the investment that you are considering.

[tatewise]

You said you are producing a family tree. That provides all the relationships to cousins, great aunts and uncles, etc. So why reproduce those relationships in the reports?

Use the tree as an index to the reports, and just produce individual summary or narratives reports per person. But do decide an easy method to find each individual report based on either surnames or record id.

[RBH425]

I have published (2) books, one a lengthy volume filled with pictures & stories.. the other much, much smaller. (20 pages)

I use the narrative descendants by generation report. This gives me a bit of story look to my book, lists people by generations, and numbers them.
I did have to tweak the format a bit, and then saved the format as a customized report.

I think any type of publishing whether for personal or public use is wonderful!
Congrats!
Robin

[philmcleod]

Thanks all. I now have some ideas to work on

[philmcleod]

The narrative descendants by generation report is good but to avoid repetition of people and to break my tree into manageable pieces I want to experiment with one or two generations at a time. However, if I set the options for say 2 generations the report also always shows the children of the second generation in full detail even though they are in italics. Is there an option I have missed to show the childrens names but to exclude the detail of the 3rd generation
Thanks

[tatewise]

No, that is the nature of the Descendants by Generation report.

Try the Individual Narrative report, which lists the Children, and in Options you can exclude Child Events/Attributes, so it is just like a Descendants by Generation report for 1 generation, but without the Child details.

[jimlad68]

philmcleod, I had a similar problem, but mine was that the italics generation does not give the full detail of individuals, afraid I am away from home at present so can't remember exactly what was missing. So, although easy but not automatic, I created an extra generation, output to *.rtf, then manually deleted the italic generation in word. As I use a word macro to tidy/colour the output, I could probably just add to it to delete the italic generation.