* Descendent Report assistance required

[IanTS]

Hi,

I've just registered on here but have been using FH since 2008 to document my family's history, which I have been researching since 2005.  I have used this user group to help me on the quiet for many years now but the time has now come for me to ask a question, and I hope you don't mind me asking a Version 5 question on my first post ?  

I am now pulling together all the information into reports and books for others to look at, but I'm struggling to see how to do something in a report or book, I'll try and explain .....

Parents A & B have 6 children, 1 to 6

All 6 children are married and have their own children, etc. etc. down the descendant line

Parents A & B therefore have many descendents, in my case over 500 for these parents.

I want to produce a 'descendents by (all) generations' narrative report, with Parent A being the root, which is of course simple to do ..... but ..... I want to exclude all the descendents of, lets say, child 2 from the narrative but still have the report showing the descendents of the other 5 children as if it were the standard descendents by generations report for Parent A.  I do hope this is making sense.

I think I must be missing something simple, but I just can't see a way of doing this without the report becoming overly long and too complicated to read, even when I try and use queries to generate the report.

Thanks for taking the time read this, any advice will be very gladly received.

Ian



ID:6353

[tatewise]

I think the only way to achieve that is to actually prune off the Descendants you don't want in the Report.

To avoid risking your primary Project, first make a copy by using File > Project Window.
Select the primary Project and click More Tasks > Copy Project and set a new Project Name of Copy.
You probably need to copy Project File and Project Data Subfolder Only.

Open the copy Project, and locate the Child whose Descendants you don't want reported.
In their Property Box, on the Main tab, click the blue triangular button to the right of their 1st Child.

In this Property Box, select the All tab, right-click the Family Record to the right of the Parents family item, and choose Clear Link.
Then click the white Go Back left-arrow at the top.

Now you can repeat that process for the 2nd Child, and 3rd Child, et seq.

When done you can create your Narrative Descendants by Generation Report and save it.

Use Edit > Undo Clear Link repeatedly to restore the pruned Descendants.

Now you can repeat the whole technique for another Individual whose Descendants you want to prune.

When finished you can use File > Project Window > More Tasks > Delete Project.

[IanTS]

Thanks for the reply,

Yep, that sounds like a reasonable way forward, another way I thought of was to actually run the standard report and then edit it in a word processor.

I just hoped that maybe there would be a more elegant way to do it using FH itself.  It does not seem like a hard thing to program in (maybe I'm wrong there), an option to exclude family members and their descendents from a standard report.

[tatewise]

I tried post-editing the standard Report in a word-processor, but you not only have to delete the unwanted Descendants, but also renumber all the Sections and their Cross-references. Otherwise, there are gaps in the Section numbering sequence, that look a bit odd.

It does not seem like a hard thing to program in.

Maybe, but I don't suppose it is high on Calico Pie's list, and often the trickiest bit is the user interface.

[Jane]

Another option is simply to mark the descendants you want to hide with the private flag and then run the report with the privacy option set, you could use a query to set the flag.

I have never seen a request for this in the last 12 years, so I doubt it would attract a lot of votes.

[tatewise]

Jane's alternative is similar to mine, but rather less risky.
Initially you could run Descendants Query and use Set Flag on Row Records to set Living Flag.
Then after creating the Report you need to remember to run Descendants Query again, and use Clear Flag on Row Records, or alternatively just use Edit > Undo.

Perhaps all best done in a Copy of your Project.

[IanTS]

Thanks for the tips.

Jane, maybe I'm the only one that is trying to get a readable report/book without a lot of duplications [wink]

A lot of so called Aunts and Uncles down my line were in fact only cousins, twice, three or more times removed, and I wanted a report/book that included everyone in my trees but did not duplicate parts of the trees.

Anyway, thanks again for the tips.