Tuesday 18 May 2010

Creating my family tree

Welcome to Family History on Film. I am a film maker with Beautiful Memories and capture life stories on film. Many clients include their family tree in their film when talking about their ancestors. I create family trees in powerpoint, inserting them as an image into the film. I show the whole tree and focus on the photo and their position on the family tree when the particular family member is being talked about. It works well but to produce a family tree in this way is fiddly and time consuming.

So last week I set about finding out how to produce a more professional looking family tree using software that captures all the information in one place. Using Google and searched the words 'family tree' and got 74 million + results with sites such as Ancestry.co.uk; myheritage.com; FindMy Past.co.uk; genesreunited.co.uk;

I remembered a cousin had, over the last couple of years, entered most of our family back to c.1700s. I thought this would save me a lot of input time, and so through her pages, I added and updated information for my grandparents/parents and uploaded photos. Fairly easy to do.
Now I just wanted a print out of the family tree showing all information I had entered.

However it was really frustrating because

I could print the page visible on the screen, but not the whole tree.
I could reduce the page, but the text was too small to read.
I could print in sections, but as I moved across the screen I lost some of the details,
I could see the names and dates but not all the additional information, which could only be seen via a drop down box!
I could have a print out of each individual with all the information and their photo, but not as part of the family tree!!

Almost half a day wasted and no print out. I'm going back to powerpoint. Does anyone have any tips or ideas how to create a family tree that can be printed out as a whole tree with all the information and photos included on one sheet?

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