Another question if anyone can help please.
The tree I have printed in FTM 2005 shows each person in a box with baptism and death details, the marriage partner is joined by 2 narrow lines making another box with the details of that person. On my previous program the married couple were shown all in one box along with baptism and death details. Does anyone know where this is possible to do in FTM 2005
Many thanks
You can certainly add baptism and death details, just select the type of tree that you want and go to
Contents, Items to include in each box. There is a pick list on the left. Any of those items can be added to the box by clicking on the > mark (or removed using <) and then moved up or down the list.
I don't think there is any way to put a couple in the same box, indeed that would make it complicated in the case of multiple spouses, do all three or more fit in the same box and what about their children.
There are no doubt work-arounds that can be applied depending on what you want to do with your tree and the print quality needed and how much trouble you are prepared to go to. For instance you could capture the screen image (Ctrl-PrtScr, other methods are available) and paste it into Paint (supplied with Windows) and clean it up the way you like). You could print out a tree from FTM and then literally cut and paste the boxes where you want them, just letting FTM manage the contents for you. (You could get one of those old-fashioned family tree 'tree' pictures as background!).
It is because of problems like this that I'm not a great fan of tree charts, they only behave nicely if you go for strict child, parents, grandparents etc. splitting in twos. Start adding siblings at any generation and it is all so unpredictable - (What happened to the great uncle that went to Australia? - Oh no! He married twice and had six kids by each marriage, where do I fit all that in?)
There is no right way, just find something that works for you and your data and they way that you would like to present it. Personally I am more concerned with obtaining, verifying and managing my data rather than presenting a 'final' report. It is here that I think these genealogy programs come into their own. It is worth exploring some of the tools that they offer and stick with the ones that work for you, better to wield a well-directed hammer than spend all day trying to get the circular saw to work that you have never used before! If I was giving advice to myself(!) I would say keep a research diary. FTM has a built in Research Journal but I have never used it, I do have an A4 notepad that I
sometimes use. The problem here is that when things are flowing it gets in the way and I don't want to spend time on 'admin'. The downside is that if I interupt my work it takes time to pick up the thread and make sure that I don't repeat work done before.