The Family View: Navigating

What Is the Family View?

The Home Family

Backtracking and Retracing

The Person Menu (Spouses, Siblings, & Children)

Resizing the Reunion Window, Family View, & Sidebar

The Title Bar

The Bottom Bar

Sharing the Family View (Printing, Emailing, Copying)

Customizing the Family View

Navbar

Sidebar

Quickbar

What Is the Family View?

The core of Reunion is the family view — it's the "center" of Reunion. This is where you will do most of your traveling. Visualize the family view as an immediate family, including...

Click on the names of parents or children to navigate to their records. In effect, you're moving up or down your family tree — backward or forward in time.

By clicking on a parent, you go immediately to the parent's family, where the parents appear in the middle of the screen. Their children's names will appear below, and their respective parents will be listed above.

By clicking on a child, you travel to the child's immediate family, and the child appears in the middle of the screen.

Only one immediate family can be seen at a time.

Enveloping the family view, you'll find the following goodies...

In addition to clicking children and parent buttons, Reunion has several other tools for navigating from one person/family to another.

The Home Family

The home family is the family that appears when you open a family file. To go back home, click the Home button on the bottom bar. (Some folks refer to this as the home page or the home person.)

There are several ways to designate a person's record as home...

If you delete the family currently designated as home, Reunion will use family ID #1 as the new home. ID numbers are explained here.

When you close a family file and the last person/couple you were looking at was not the home family, Reunion will remember that particular family. The next time you open the family file, you can click the Back button (immediately after opening the family file) to show that family.

Backtracking and Retracing

Anytime you wish to see the family that was showing before the current one, click the Back button on the bottom bar. This feature lets you backtrack through the last 200 families you viewed.

If you use the Back button to backtrack, you can use the Forward button to retrace your steps.

The keyboard shortcuts for these two buttons are...

The History Button

As you navigate in the family view — moving from family to family, whether using the Back, Home, or Forward buttons, person buttons, a sidebar, or List window — Reunion keeps track of where you've been in a "history" list. Click the History button in the bottom bar to show a list of couples in the history list.

This feature provides a quick way to revisit the people and families you've recently visited.

Looking at the list, the current family is at the bottom. As you move from the bottom to the top of the list, couples are shown in the order that they appeared in the family file. Clicking any item in the list will take you directly to the respective family or person.

Choose the Clear history menu item
or
Option-click the History button to clear the list.

The Person Menu

The Person menu button appears in the upper-right corner of all person buttons in the family view (children, couple, and parents). Clicking it will show a menu with several items.

person menu

Note: the same, handy menu appears if you Control-click (or right-click) any person button or anybody's name in a sidebar.

Spouses & Children

If a person has multiple spouses, the Person menu button will appear in red . If you click the red button one of the items in the menu is Spouses & Children. Choosing this item reveals a submenu with the person's spouses and the children she had with each spouse.

Choose a spouse from this menu to navigate to the family record for an individual and one of her spouses. Choose a child from this submenu to navigate to the child's record.

spouses

Siblings

Similarly, to navigate to a person's sibling, choose him or her from the Siblings submenu of the Person menu (this menu includes half siblings).

Alternatively, to open a sibling's family you can click a parent's button, and then, from the parent's family, click a sibling's child button.

Child status, if any, is appended to the names of siblings in the menu.

Other Items in the Person Menu

Clicking a Person menu button reveals many other features and shortcuts described elsewhere in this manual. Click the links below to learn more about each feature...

Resizing the Reunion Window, Family View, Sidebar, and Navbar

To resize the Reunion application window, click and drag any edge of the Reunion window.

To resize the sidebar and family view, move the mouse pointer directly between the right edge of the family view and the left edge of the sidebar. The pointer will become a resize cursor. Just click and drag, left or right, when the cursor changes.

Hiding/showing the sidebar is explained here. Making the navbar occupy less space, by hiding text in the navbar, is explained here.

You might want to change the size of the Reunion application window in order to see more stuff. For example, you might want to make the sidebar wider or narrower, or the family view wider for longer place names or taller to see more fields under the main couple. Also, there are times when you'll want to read this manual or see the List window, or a multimedia window. Finally, you may be interacting with other application windows adjacent to or partially behind Reunion.

The contents of the family view are dynamic. As you enlarge the family view, Reunion will display more information in proportion to its size. Thus, with larger monitors and higher resolutions you will be able to see more fields, and as the family view is made wider, fields and buttons with names will become longer to better accommodate the display of longer entries.

If you reduce the height of the family view, Reunion will reduce the size of note fields and dynamic fields to accommodate. It will also remove fields in the family view as needed. If you then increase the size of the family view, the fields will return and the size of fields will increase to fill the family view portion of the Reunion application window.

If the current family view shows child buttons in a list, then resizing the Reunion application window vertically will increase/decrease the space allotted for the list of children. When children do not appear in a list, then resizing the Reunion application window vertically will increase/decrease the space allocated for fields under the main couple in the family view.

Keep in mind that your entire entries (such as longer place names, notes, etc.) are safe and will appear on all documents (with one exception), but they could be cropped as they appear in the family view, especially on small screens. If you have lots of long entries, one suggestion is to abbreviate certain words (like cemetery). The actual limits (number of characters) for each field are listed here.

The minimum size for the Reunion window is 1030 x 659 pixels. The maximum size is limited only by your display.

The Title Bar

The title bar appears at the top of the Reunion window. You can move the Reunion window by clicking and dragging the title bar.

The various elements of the title bar are described below, moving from left to right...

The Bottom Bar

The bottom bar is a line of information located at the bottom of the Reunion application window. You can move the Reunion application window by clicking and dragging the bottom bar.

The various elements of the bottom bar are described below, moving from left to right...

Note: the buttons beneath the family view will either disappear or change when Family View is not selected in the navbar. For example, when Tree View or Logs is selected.

Sharing the Family View - Printing, Emailing, Copying

To share an image of the family view (print, email, or copy to the Clipboard), click the Share button in the bottom bar, under the family view.

The Share window has the following options...

The image of the family view that gets printed or copied depends on what you see on-screen. Thus, we suggest resizing the Reunion window to the appropriate shape and size to include the necessary fields in the family view. You may also want to create a custom family view specifically for printing/copying family views.