!Family Chapter 2. The Main display window

When started, !Family opens two windows, showing the currently loaded tree (if any) and a smaller window with notes associated with the "Current Person". If no tree was loaded, the main window will be blank and no notes window will be opened.

The tree displayed is based on the concept of "the current person", and the current person is recorded whenever a file is saved from the program. The tree will ideally show the current person, his parents, siblings, and all descendants. If he exists in the database, the person at the "top" of the tree will be the current person's father. Failing that, it will be his mother, and if neither of these exist in the database, it will be the current person him- or herself. The title bar of the window shows the name of the GEDCOM file .

If you left-click on a person, then that person will become the new current person, and the tree is redisplayed based on that person. So that as long as the current person has one or both parents in the database, you can keep on clicking on the top person to go back a generation. This soon makes the tree too big for the screen, and the window becomes scrollable to see all the people on display.

The display shows males in blue, females in red, and those whose gender is unknown in green. With the default options set, under each person will be a pair of dates representing birth and death. If a birth date is unknown, it is marked "?", but if a death date is unknown, it is simply left blank. The person may be still alive !

Husband and wife are shown one above the other, with at least an equals sign between them. If a marriage date is known (and the option to display these dates is set) then that date will be shown next to the equals sign. For multiple marriages by one person, each marriage is marked by either a date, or, if this is not known, or not being shown, then a sequence number.

If a person's spouse is unknown, but they have descendants, the equals sign is still shown, but there is a gap where the spouse would be. Below each married couple, their descendants are shown, linked by lines in the conventional manner. If the descendants are married, the process is repeated down to the most recent known issue.

2.1 "Person" menu

If you click menu on a person shown on the tree, a small menu will pop up with the person's name as the title. The top item, "Edit" opens a tabbed dbox which enables you to edit the person's event details (Birth, Christening, Baptism, Death, Cremation, Burial) - see Edit Person Dbox for full details.

The next group of items "Marry", "Unmarry", "Child", "Older" and "Remove" are for manipulating the structure of the tree.

Marry

Will prompt for a name of a person to marry. That name may be one already in the database, in which case the two people will be connected, or it may be a name not in the database, in which case the individual will be created. This gives lots of scope for creating new people when you didn't mean to by misspelling the name slightly, or for marrying to someone with the same name as the spouse you wanted to create. The "name matching" feature is used to overcome these potential problems, but the implementation details have not yet been sorted, so the manual doesn't describe these details.

UnMarry

Is used to remove a marriage, when a mistake has been made. The submenu lists possible spouses of the person in the main menu - select one and click to remove that marriage. If the marriage had issue, the children will remain as issue of one spouse, and you will need to use the Edit person dbox on those children to change the names of Mother and/or Father to place them as offspring of another pair of parents.

Child

This will pop up an Edit person dbox with the relevant parent filled in. For example, if you clicked on a male, and chose "Child", the Edit Person dbox would show a new person, with the "Father" field filled in with the name of the person you first clicked on. The mother field would be blank. If you fill this name in with one of the father's spouses in the database, then the child is added to that marriage. If you leave the field blank, a new family (with an unknown mother) will be created.

Older

Will only be available when a person has older siblings. Clicking this will make this person older than the sibling immediately to the left. [Technical note: Siblings are displayed in the order in which they are defined in the FAM object of the GEDCOM file, which is independant of the actual dates of birth which may be recorded. Clicking "older" swaps the order of the CHIL tags, it doesn't change any dates of birth.]

Remove

The person clicked on will be removed from the database, along with all his or her details. All references to the person will also be removed, which means that it can be quite a lot of work to add a person deleted in error back into the tree !

One more menu item currently appears in this menu, "Marriage". This leads to a submenu listing possible spouses, and clicking on one will open a dbox dealing with events affecting the family, rather than the individual, such as engagement, marriage and divorce. It is intended that this menu item will move to a different pop-up menu shortly. See Family Events Dbox for full details.

2.2 Iconbar menu

The iconbar menu has some standard entries, such as Info=> and Quit, which are pretty much familiar and self-explanatory. It will shortly get a "Help" menu item, which will lead into this manual. Most of the other items are concerned with generating various forms of report:

Print

This will attempt to print the currently displayed tree via the installed printer driver. Multiple pages will be used, as needed. The method used tries to minimise the number of sheets of paper used, but once that has been determined, it tries to maximise the overlap between pages, to make joining them up easier.

Choices

This opens a dbox to configure the detailed behaviour of the program. See The Preferences dbox. Actually, in !Family, most of these choices are set in submenus of the iconbar menu, and only the choice "misc..." opens a dbox, but this is intended to change to a somewhat friendlier interface.

Reset

Clicking this will discard the tree currently displayed. You will be warned if the data are unsaved and offered a chance to save the file.

Report

Opens a saveas dbox. Dragging the icon somewhere will produce a text file listing everything known about every individual in the tree.

Ancestors

Opens a saveas dbox. Dragging the icon somewhere will produce a text file listing all known ancestors in a direct line back from the current person. Note that the current person is almost at the top of the tree on the display, but will be at the bottom of the tree in this file.

Families

Opens a saveas dbox. Dragging the icon somewhere will produce a text file listing all the family groups defined in the tree, with details of family events, parents and issue.

Draw

Opens a saveas dbox. Dragging the icon somewhere will produce a !Draw file of the current display, using the font and scale settings defined in the Choices submenu. Drawing a tree is a complicated business, and you may find that you can get a more compact and neater output by saving to a draw file and manipulating the drawing yourself, rather than just using "Print" directly. The developer finds that with really big trees (back twenty or so generations) this can save a lot of paper ! It can also be useful if you want to merge two ancestral lines onto one diagram.

Web pages

Opens a dbox with a saveas icon. This is intended to generate an html (browsable) structure to put up on a website so that others can browse your tree without needing genealogical software. You can drag html files to the two load targets at the top of the dbox, for adding things like logos, or navigation to other pages on your site. Ticking the box "omit details of persons flagged as living" will do just that - all dates and places relating to people for whom the "Living" option is ticked in the Edit person dbox will be suppressed. Note that this is implemented through the "LVG" tag, which though used by several genealogical products, is not part of the GEDCOM Specification. I'm not sure that !Family's implementation is the same as other programs', but the net effect is fine in this context.

If you have RISC OS 4, or fewer than 75 people in your tree, you can ignore the warning about image filing systems. Otherwise, you need to be aware that !Family will generate a file for each person in your tree, as well as an index page, and something like x-files, rafs or !SparkFS will be needed which supports more than 77 files per directory.

Save

The final item simply allows you to drag the GEDCOM icon to save your whole tree in the standard GEDCOM file format.