X!Family Chapter 2. The Main display window

When started, X!Family opens one window, showing the currently loaded tree (if any). If no tree was loaded, the window will be blank.

At the moment, it is not clear whether there will be a "master window" in which all views of all trees loaded will be listed. If that turns out to be the cleanest way of handling multiple trees, then it is this window that you will see when the program is started with no tree loaded. However, at present, the program automatically loads a tree on startup and this is what you will see.

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 and the name of the current person.

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 right-click on a person shown on the tree, a small menu will pop up with the person's name as the title. The top two items, "Edit" and "Notes" open additional windows. "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. "Notes" open a small text-editor window containing free-text notes about the person which can be edited, or cut-and-pasted to other applications.

The next group of items "Marry", "Older", "Child" 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.
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.]
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.
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 !

The final item on the pop-up menu is "Reports" which opens a submenu listing possible reports you can generate based on the person you clicked on. Currently the only item on this submenu is "Ancestors". It is intended that clicking this will generate a condensed ahnentafel showing all known direct ancestors of this person, and then prompt for a place to save the file. Currently, however, the code to do this is not yet implemented.

2.2 Family menu

If you right-click on the equals sign, date or sequence number of a marriage, a small menu will pop up showing the id-number of the FAM object as title. [Aside: if you don't know the internals of GEDCOM files, think of this number as just a unique identifier for a particular family. To know more about the GEDCOM, see Appendix B.]

The first two items on this menu, "Edit" and "Notes" fulfill similar fucntions to the items of the same name on the Person menu. "Edit" opens a tabbed dbox which enables you to edit the event details associated with the family (currently Engagement, Marriage and Divorce) - see Family Events Dbox for full details. "Notes" open a small text-editor window containing free-text notes about the family which can be edited, or cut-and-pasted to other applications.

The second group of menu items "Earlier", "Unmarry" and "Child" are again for manipulating the structure of the tree.

Earlier: Will only be available when a person is shown with more than one family on the current tree view, and marriage clicked on is not the earliest, as shown on the view. Clicking this item will swap the order of this family and the one immediately to its left. [Technical note: Families are displayed in the order in which they are defined in the INDI object of the GEDCOM file, which is independant of the actual dates of marriage which may be recorded. Clicking "earlier" swaps the order of the FAMS tags, it doesn't change any recorded dates.]
Unmarry: This is to remove the FAM object defining a marriage. If there are no descendants, this is straightforward. If descendants are listed for a family, the program will currently assume that they should remain connected to the father, which means that the mother is detached from the marriage, but the FAM object still exists. Children can be detached from a parent using the Edit Person dbox. It is recognised that this mechanism is a little cumbersome, but it should only be needed to correct major mistakes, and thus pretty rarely.
Child: This will pop up an Edit person dbox with both parents filled in, so that the new child whose details you enter will be added to the relevant family. A new child is always added to the right of existing siblings, as if the youngest. Normally this is OK, as you would add children in that order when putting data into the database. If you discover another child later, or discover that one originally added as the youngest needs to be moved up, you can use the "Older" item on the person menu as noted in section 2.1 above.

Next | Prev | Table of Contents