What Is a Direct Line?
Showing Direct Lines by Making Children Bold
Direct Lines in Reports and Charts
More Than One Bold Child in a Family
A direct line represents a chain of people between an ancestor and a descendant. It doesn't include siblings, cousins, spouses, etc. For example, the direct line between you and your great, great grandfather is as shown below:
You can designate children in a family to appear with bold text. This creates a nice visual aid for showing direct lines of descent from generation to generation — making it easier to navigate through your family file. Most people use this feature to help find their way back to themselves.
Note: | In macOS, not all fonts can appear in bold. Thus, depending on your font setting for child buttons, you may not see any difference between a child displayed with normal text, and a child with bold text. |
---|
Manually Making Children Bold
Children can be made bold "manually" in two ways...
Automatically Making Children Bold
You can also create bold children for all of your direct ancestors automatically — to visually depict direct lines in your family file. To do this...
This opens the Direct Lines Bold panel, shown below.
Step 1
When you're about to make the children bold for the direct ancestors of somebody, you have three options for handling existing children.
Make all children plain
If this option is selected, Reunion will convert all children to plain text (on all families). If any children are bold, they will become plain.
Make children plain on ancestors' families only
If this option is selected, Reunion will convert all children on ancestors' families to plain text. No other child buttons are affected.
Don't change any bold children
If this option is selected, Reunion will not change the font style of any existing children. One reason for doing this would be to designate direct lines from two relatives back to a common ancestor. For example, if you make direct lines bold from you and from a second cousin, the common ancestor would be your great grandfather. Your great grandfather's family record would show two bold children — one representing the direct line to you and one representing the direct line to your second cousin. (See example below.)
Step 2
Select the starting person — the person whose ancestor's children you want to appear in bold text — and click
The Direct Lines Bold feature moves backward in time, identifying direct-line ancestors until it can't find any more.A confirming message will appear just beneath the
button, letting you know how many family records were affected.To select a different starting person, click any name in any sidebar to change the starting person.
Changing All Child Buttons to Plain Text
To make all children plain...
Some reports and charts can be limited or pruned to include only people with bold children.
For example, let's say you want to make a descendant chart showing the direct line from your earliest ancestor to you. Here's how to do it...
This forces Reunion to create a descendant chart that includes only one person in each generation between you and the earliest ancestor — the direct line. The result is a very focused descendant chart resembling this...
The simple example chart below includes the direct line from you to your GG Grandfather and the siblings along the way. The red connecting line shows the direct line.
Creating a direct-line chart/report with siblings (like the above example) is accomplished by selecting the "
" option (in the chart/report panel) and also selecting the " " option which appears when creating descendant charts, descendant reports, family history reports, and register reports.By including direct lines and siblings, the chart or report is still focused on the direct line, but not quite so "narrow."
Another way to achieve a very limited chart — only including the connections between you and another person — is by using marking.
If you have made direct-line children bold using two different related people as starting persons, you may discover that one or more family cards has more than one bold child. Any such family cards represent a common ancestor — the ancestor who, when moving backward in time from either relative, represents the point where their direct lines meet.
Reunion can also search for interfamily marriages.
Let's say you want to send a report to a third cousin showing how the two of you are related. Here's how to do it:
This will force Reunion to only include descendants whose child buttons appear with bold text — in this case, the direct lines. The result is a very focused report (or chart) like the examples shown below.
By the way, simply by making more bold child buttons you can "hand pick" other people to appear in the chart. For example, if you wanted to show how three cousins are related. Or, if you want to include the children of direct ancestors, but not the descendants of each child.
These examples show only the direct lines from Peter LEISTER to Allen William APPLE and Harry Franklin LEISTER. Peter LEISTER is the common ancestor. Allen William APPLE and Harry Franklin LEISTER are third cousins.
This is a descendant chart showing direct lines:
This is a descendant report showing direct lines:
Peter LEISTER | Harry Jerome LEISTER | | Mary Ellen LEISTER | | | William Allen APPLE | | | | Allen William APPLE | Franklin Benjamin LEISTER | | Harry Melvin LEISTER Sr. | | | Harry Melvin LEISTER Jr. | | | | Harry Franklin LEISTER
More information about creating charts that show the relationship between two people is located here.