The Summary Sidebar
What Is the Summary Sidebar?
Summary Settings
Sharing the Summary Sidebar
Surnames in the Summary Sidebar
The Surname Quickview
The Surname Tracer
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Sidebars
What Is the Summary Sidebar?
The Summary sidebar provides a recap of various statistics for people along with the ability to drill down for more specifics, exploration, or navigation.
For example, it provides a quick way to see...
- The number of descendants of a person.
- A list of the descendants grouped by relationship.
- The number of unique surnames of a person's ancestors.
- The names of each half-sibling of a person.
- Etc.
All of the statistics and details are updated instantly as you navigate to different people in the family file.
Up to 13 different categories of information may appear in the Summary sidebar. The title of each category can be clicked to reveal more specifics.
In the example on the right, the Siblings and Half-siblings are revealed; thus you see the name of each sibling and half-sibling.
Similarly, if Descendant Surnames is clicked, a list of each surname will appear, with the ability to explore more detail about each surname.
summary
Several categories of information can appear in the Summary sidebar while navigating in the family view. Separate lists appear for the husband and wife.
To include/exclude categories in the Summary sidebar, click the Settings button (at the bottom of the sidebar) and then check/uncheck buttons in the Summary Settings (see illustration to the right).
For each category, the Summary sidebar will show the number of people in the category and, if revealed by clicking the little gray triangles, a list of the names of every person in the category.
Here are the categories:
- Spouses.
- Siblings.
- Half-siblings.
- Step-siblings.
- Descendants/generations - The direct-line descendants and the maximum number of generations in that line.
- Children - The number of children is also included in the number of descendants.
- Step-children - The number of step-children is not included in the number of descendants. (Note: the listing of step-children may be impacted when child buttons are duplicated. Learn more.)
- Ancestors/generations - The direct-line ancestors and the maximum number of generations found in those lines.
- Parents - All parents for a person will be counted; however, only the preferred parents will be included in the number of ancestors. While unlikely, a person could have a higher number of parents than ancestors.
- Step-parents - The number of step-parents are not included in the number of ancestors.
- Treetops - These are the earliest known ancestors of a person (identical to the list appearing in the Treetops sidebar).
- Treebottoms — These are the direct line descendants who have no children.
- Surnames — These are the surnames of descendants, surnames of ancestors, and surname variations. This feature is described below.
More About the Summary Sidebar
- Revealing More Detail: When a disclosure triangle is clicked to reveal more detail for a category, the Summary sidebar reveals the category for both the husband and wife in the current family view. For example, disclosing Ancestor Surnames will show a list of each ancestor surname for the husband and the wife. Then, clicking a surname will reveal the Surname Quickview, a feature described below.
- Marking: The Summary sidebar has a marking column on the left side, for easily marking individual people or for marking every person within a category.
- About instant updating: The Summary sidebar is not updated instantly if the Summary sidebar itself is used to navigate. For example, clicking on somebody's ancestors in the Summary sidebar will navigate to the ancestor's record and not re-populate the Summary sidebar. This behavior facilitates the exploration of one person's ancestors, treetops, etc.
Having said that, if you want to update the Summary sidebar after using it to navigate, click the Update button at the bottom of the list.
- Keyboard Shortcut: from the family view, press Shift+Command+U to show the Summary sidebar.
- The Person menu appears when control/right clicking a person's name in the Summary sidebar.
Sharing the Summary Sidebar
A text version of the Summary sidebar can be reported for each person via the Share button, along the top-right edge, as shown below.

Surnames in the Summary Sidebar
The Summary sidebar has a section for exploring surnames, including several features to identify and aggregate surnames, starting with any source person.
To see the Summary sidebar, click Summary in the list of sidebars. (If you don't see surnames in the Summary sidebar, then, then be sure to enable Surnames in the Sidebar settings — the little gear icon at the bottom.)
The Summary sidebar includes collapsible sections for listing Ancestor Surnames, Descendant Surnames, and Surname Variations. The total number of each is appended to their subsection names. And every surname is appended with the number of people having that surname, as shown in the example to the right.
The source person appears at the top of the list — the surnames are aggregated based on the source person.
- Ancestor surnames include the surnames for all direct ancestors of the source person. Much like an ancestor tree, moving backward in time: Source person, father, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, etc.
- Descendant surnames include the surnames for all direct-line descendants of the source person. Think of this as a descendant chart, that collects the surnames of children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc. For example, if the source person's surname is SMITH and he has a child who marries a man with the surname JONES, and together they have a child whose surname is JONES, then JONES would be included in the list of descendant surnames.
- Surname variations begin with the earliest paternal ancestor of the source person and then trace surnames for all his children and the children of male children. This feature is designed to show how a surname has changed through the generations. For example, let's say the surname of the earliest paternal ancestor of the source person is "JONES." Then all of his descendant male lines are traced forward in time, looking for variations in surnames. If the earliest JONES has a descendant named Leroy "JONESY" then "JONESY" would be considered a surname variation. This list also includes the surname of the source person.
Clicking any of the surnames in the Summary sidebar will open the Surname Quickview window, described in the next section.
The Surname Quickview
The Surname Quickview window shows more detail about the surname you click in the Summary sidebar, including...
- Usage — This is the number of people with the surname, relative to the current source person and direction (ancestors or descendants). In the example on the right, the current surname is "WELLER," the current source person is "Paul Raymond RICKENBAUGH," and we are looking at descendant surnames.
- Living — This is the number of people with the surname (relative to the current source person and direction) who do not have a death date entry and whose lifespan is less than the current "Living Age" (set in your Reunion settings > Dates).
- Earliest date and Latest date — These are the birth/death dates for people with the current surname (relative to the current source person and direction). If a surname shows today's date in the "Latest Date" column, it means that there is one or more persons with that surname living today. However, all event dates are considered. So if the only event for a person is the 1920 Census then the earliest and latest dates will be from that census event.
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If there is no death date then the burial date will be used. If there is no burial date then the latest event date will be used (which could be birth).
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To help get a better date range when birth and/or death is missing, family event dates are also considered. Marriage, disposition and family event date will be considered for all families/spouses of each person.
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The determination of "earliest/latest" dates works like Reunion's Names & Facts report.
- Generations — This number is the span of generations (relative to the current source person) in which people having the current surname are found.
Who is the "Closest" or "Earliest" person?
The closest or earliest person encountered for the surname will appear at the bottom of the Surname Quickview.
- For descendants, the closest person would be the first descendant encountered while going down the bloodline one generation at a time. I.e., the closest descendant (generationally speaking) to the source person. If there are two people in the same generation with a surname, the descendant of the oldest child will appear here.
- For ancestors (and surname variations), the closest person would be the nearest ancestor (generationally speaking) to the source person.
- For surname variations, the "Earliest" person shows the point where a new surname (or alternate spelling) was introduced into the branch.
Clicking the round, green Go button will navigate to the family view for the closest/earliest person.
Finding People with the Selected Surname
Click the Search button (the magnifying glass icon in the top-left of the Surname Quickview) to find people with the selected surname (relative to the current source person). A list of these people will appear in the Results sidebar.

Note: if there is only one matching person with the selected surname, then the magnifying glass icon does not appear.
The Surname Tracer window shows a list of...
- Surnames of a person's ancestors.
- Surnames of a person's descendants.
- Surname variations based on the earliest paternal ancestor of a person.
Here is an example Surname Tracer window with 4 surname variations...

There are two ways to see the Surname Tracer window...
Click the List button, in the upper-right corner of the Surname Quickview.
- Select Surname Tracer from any Person menu...

Using the Surname Tracer
The information in all 6 columns of the Surname Tracer was described above, in the Surname Quickview.
Also, as mentioned, "Earliest Date" and "Latest Date" refer to the birth/death dates for the people with the selected surname. If a surname shows today's date in the "Latest Date" column, it means that there is one or more persons with that surname living today.
In the illustration above, if today's date was "3 Aug 2021" then the Surname Tracer would show that we have a LAUVER living today (because that date appears in the "Latest Date" column).
Double-click any surname in the Surname Tracer to find people with the selected surname (relative to the current source person). A list of these people will appear in the Results sidebar. Or, click the Search button (the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the Surname Tracer).
The "Closest" or "Earliest" person (appearing at the bottom of the Surname Tracer window) was described above, in the Surname Quickview. Click the Go button or click directly on the Closest/Earliest person’s name to navigate to their family view.
Content of the Surname Tracer window can be shared via the Share button at the bottom of the Surname Tracer window. The content is shared as a graphic, not as text.
- When listing surnames for ancestors or descendants, the source person is not included in the list.
- In cases of complex surnames, the content of Last Name fields will be parsed into words in order to catch the listing of multiple surnames. For example, if a Last Name field was "DIXON/DIXSON" then the sampling of one person would count for two surname entries in the list. If you have surnames that contain multiple words and you want Reunion to handle both words as one longer word, then use a non-breaking space character between the names. A non-breaking space character is created by typing Option-space and has the same appearance as a regular space character. For example, if a non-breaking space is inserted between Kleine and Deters, Reunion will see the entry as one word instead of two. It would then appear as the surname Klein Deters, rather than being treated as two separate surnames.