An Ancestor Lines Explorer

Question

I have been asked to make you aware that the latest version of the recently released Ancestor Line Explorer is now live on every WT profile under in the Tree Apps tab. The original version has seen improvements in the user interface (thanks to all who made suggestions) as well as in retrieval speed now that it makes use of more efficient server calls to obtain the data.

Example showing repeating ancestors.

By default you are shown 4 generations of ancestors (i.e. 5 generations in total), but it is easy to request more. By choosing a brick wall colour other than black, you can quickly see which ancestors are missing both parents.

My original reason for developing this view was so that I could clearly see where specific ancestors fit in my tree as well as who, where and how my repeated ancestors fit the picture. To this end repeated ancestors are flagged with coloured squares and clicking the square will highlight not only their occurrence(s), but also the paths (or ancestor lines) to them. If you enter WikiTree IDs in the provided "People of Interest" field (and redraw the tree), the ancestor line(s) to those people are highlighted (if they are in the loaded tree data of course) using a different colour.

Extensive help is available if you click on the green circle with the question mark and also if you hover your cursor over any of the controls on the page.

Have fun, and please report any issues to me.

[Edited to add screenshot. -CW]

Comments

There are some issues with the display (based on my iPad experience):

• Connecting lines do not always show
• Some names appear on top of other names

This afternoon I was trying it out on a person who had only seven generations of ancestors. Nothing that I tried would make the app show the family tree. Other tree apps that I tried worked ok. I was on a windows 10 PC and tried both Firefox and chrome; same experience with each. Looking at the same person using Safari on my iPad this evening worked.

Personally, I do not envision using this very much (this goes for the other apps as well). What I would much rather see is a good pedigree chart, with the option of printing cascading charts for as many generations as I want.

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I am sorry that you did not have a good experience. Could you please provide me with the WikiTree ID of the profile for which the tree did not want to show on your windows 10 PC?  Which browser did you use on the PC? Thanks!

Names appearing on top of each other may happen at times, depending on the tree structure and/or length of the names. In those cases you can adjust the Edge Factor and/or Height Factor to separate the names better.

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Teresa Carrillo de Sandi.

Windows 10 using both Firefox and Chrome.

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Thank you (and apologies for asking a question you already answered earlier ).  Unfortunately I do not have a Windows machine anywhere I can access.  Will have to see if I can find a friend that could check out for me with Carrillo_de_Sandi-4.  It worked fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac and in Chrome on my Android phone.

Edit: Just want to make sure you selected 7 (or better yet 'All') in the "Limit display to generation" option?  A friend did try it in Chrome on a Windows machine and reports that it worked for him, so I am a bit stumped as to what the issue might be.

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This is amazing!

The ability to see 20 generations out / connected is exemplary and exciting!

Thank you very much for this wonderful tool!

Jim Walker-2526

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When hovering over a name to see additional information, date references are shown, but no indication as to whether the date is exact, before, after, etc.

Also, for someone whose status is "still living", the hover shows "unknown".

This seems to be handled the same in other tree apps.

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I agree the date handling can be better. I will put this on my ToDo list. Thanks for reminding me about it.

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Dates should now be more to your liking Jim. Let me know id I have missed something.

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Yes, that looks much better, thank you for working on it quickly.

Answer 1

It would make life easier if the generation numbers were done the same way as CC7 numbers, eg the source person is zero, and parents 1 etc.

Comments

The generation numbers can't be made the same as the connection numbers because they are two separate concepts. The connection distance between two generations is always one or D = (G - 1).

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Thanks Tommy for explaining why I made it the way it is. The 7 in CC7 refers to degrees of separation, so if one only considers direct ancestors (which is what this view shows) then there will always be one more generation than there are degrees of separation. 

Answer 2

Need a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the window if image exceeds dimensions of the window.

I tried it with my own id (Berntson-18) and increased the max generations to 10 and limit generations to 10.  Then I redisplayed and I could scroll up and down, but not from side to side.  When I resized the window, I was able to see all 10 generations, but I have a relatively large monitor and normally don't use the whole screen for a single window.

When I changed the max and limit to 20, I was unable to expand my window far enough to see all generations.

Comments

Oops.  I did finally get a horizontal scroll bar by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the window.  At that point, the scroll bar appeared.  But only while the vertical scroll bar is all the way at the bottom of the window.

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OK, thanks for the clarification. I was getting worried.  You can also "grab" the tree (click and don't release) and drag it left and right if you don't want to first go to the scroll bar. Also, if your machine has a trackpad, you can set it up to use 2-finger dragging for scrolling without having to bother with scroll bars.

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Dragging left and right works, but dragging up and down does not work on a tree that is too large for the window.

So, if you want to move the tree up and down, you must use the scroll bar because dragging doesn't work.  But if you want to move the tree sideways, there is no scroll bar.  You must drag the tree.  

Please enable both events in both directions.

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Not being able to drag up and down was by design since it introduced some UI issues that I could not solve at the time. I figured the scrollbar is readily available for that (but frankly, I am surprised that people still use scroll bars in this age of mouse wheels and 2-finger dragging ). Anyway, I will investigate again if I can find a way to solve the scrolling for people still using stone age tools . No, seriously, that was just a joke. I must find a solution. 

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OK, Riël, I'll admit that I turned 80 last month and I reluctantly turned in my rotary dial phone for an iphone, and I remember when scrollbars were innovative.  But, I'm flexible enough to make that leap.  You can get by with just including in the help how to scroll.

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Thank you for being kind, Peggy. I will definitely give finding a scrolling/dragging solution that works another go and will update the help.

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Peggy, you should now see 2 buttons that would allow you to scroll left and right if you browser does not show the floating horizontal scroll bar that it does for me. :)

Answer 3

This worked really well for me on a Windows laptop in a Chrome Browser. I was able to go back 15 generations pretty quickly and easily. Sorting out my tangled Webster lines will be more difficult, but at least now I can see the tangles.

 Very cool! Thanks for your work on this!

Comments

Thank you

Answer 4

The graphics posted above in the question has "See ..." in front of a couple of names. Is this an older version, or when do the words "See ..." get placed in front of the names? I can't seem to replicate the example shown.

Comments

The "see ..." is known as "connectors", so select the tickbox in front on the "Connectors" option to see those rather than the branch being duplicated

Answer 5

Here's another one.

I decide to display 8 generations instead of the default 5.  There are two drop-down lists associated with numbers of generations:  Max Generations and Limit display to generation.

When I try to set the Limit to 8, the number 8 is not in the list.  OK, I set Max to 8.  

Limit is still set to 5, so I can't display 8 when I choose re-draw tree.

So, I try Get 8 Generations and Draw Tree.

The tree is redrawn to exactly what was drawn before because Limit is still set to 5.

But once the 5 generation tree is redrawn, I can finally change Limit to 8 and redraw to get 8 generations.

Please update the available list under Limit as soon as I change Max so that the unnecessary redraw before changing Limit is eliminated.

Comments

I was wondering when someone will complain about that :).  Previously the the "limit display" was independent to what was available - you had a choice of 0 (all) to 20. However, I was then asked to limit it to the maximum of what was available, and that is what it is now. i.e. you can only set it to as high as the max generation that has been loaded.  The down side of doing as you requested (i.e. limit it to the max requested value), is that should someone request, say 15 generations, but there are only, say 8 available, then they might get confused by the fact that only 9 generations are being shown. As things are now, if you do not want to have to do the extra select and redraw, set the "limit display" value to "All" and then get whatever number of generations you want. The full tree will then be drawn.

I do agree that the current behaviour is slightly annoying, but I also don't quite know what the correct behaviour should be. Maybe others can chime in here and give their opinion?

Thank you for your feedback.

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I have decided to do as you ask. The new behaviour will be that when 'Max Generations' is changed, the maximum selectable value of 'Limit display' will be changed to whatever 'Max Generations' is. However, the moment tree has been fetched, or the tree is re-drawn, the 'Limit display' max value will be reset to the maximum value that is available in the tree. This should go live in due course.

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I was having the same issue as Peggy on Windows 10, Chrome browser with the latest update applied. No matter what I tried I could only get what I started with, 5 generations. I have max generation set to 9, limit display to All. You have a great idea here so I stuck with in, intending to come here to ask you about it. Now that you 've made a change, there is a button next to "Max Generations" that says "Get 9 generations and draw tree". When I click that, the tree disapeared but when i reloaded the page and tried again it was successful. Thank you Great tool.

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If you click the Go button, you will never get more than 5 generations. This is to prevent someone from inadvertently setting the Max Generations to a large number and then retrieving possibly large trees for every person they look at. The button next to the Max Gen value has always been there and you have to use that to get more generations. I realise this might be confusing for users, but so far I have not been able to come up with a solution for this conundrum.

I'm surprised that the tree disappeared (or rather stay disappeared) when you clicked Load button. I small green circle should appear (unfortunately the image of the shaking tree that should be in it cannot be displayed at the moment, but should be in the near future) and disappear as soon as all the data has been retrieved. At that point the new tree should show up. Note that if your screen is not big, but the tree is, you might be looking at the top left corner of the diagram where there is nothing, so some scrolling to the right will help in that situation.

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Yes, understood. I think the tree disappeared because I had the tab open over night, was there before you made the change to the tool. It needed to be refreshed to reflect the new software or tool and clicking the reload button at the top of the browser did that. Thanks again.

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OK, I understand. I also just want to make you aware of a WikiTree issue with (I think) all Tree Apps. If you leave a page with a Tree App open for a long time with no interaction, it "looses communication" (to put it in layman's term) with the WikiTree server and this can result in the page becoming unresponsive (depending on how it handles errors when communicating with the server). The only way to fix it, is to refresh the page. WikiTree is aware of it and will fix the issue in due course.

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The new behaviour I explained above has now been released and is available in the latest tree apps.

Answer 6

Thank you, Riël; I appreciate the Ancestor Line Explorer app, which helps me understand the multiple connections.

Comments

Thank you.

Answer 7

will there be a way to print out a family tree ? now as you "save" a tree it saves as a txt but wont load and display in a processsor app.

Comments

I am not sure what you mean by a "processor app". The tree that you save is meant to be loaded (later) by the same Ancestor Lines app, saving you some wait time and the WT servers some processing time if it is a large tree. It is, however, a simple json file, so some "processor app" that understands the json should be able to read it. Doing something sensible with it, however, would (I imagine) require some additional processing.

I have not considered a printing option simply because I am a total noob when it comes to generating printable versions of web pages.  However, I will add it for investigation on my ToDo list. The best I can offer at the moment is to use your web browser's Print option and be creative with page sizes and landscape mode.

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sorry my bad word, word processor, being able to print out the tree was what  iwas curious about. Other then that I liked how well it worked ! I took it to 14 levels and it was right on !

So Ill just wait on print  capabilities later hopefully

thanks !

Paul

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I made some tweaks to the app that should allow you to use your browser's print command to either print or create a PDF of your tree. Before printing you will have to play around with paper size and orientation (and perhaps other print settings) in order to get the result you want. It is not a perfect solution, but should be better than before. I looked into trying to produce a .jpeg file, but I was not happy with what I found. It is still on the to do list.

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Ill work with it !  thanks !!

Answer 8

I do not find this application of any help to me and my research.  It does not show accurate, or linked info beyond my parents, their parents, and one of my children.  This is a complete waste of my time.  

Thanx for your efforts but it does appear from the comments I've read, that you do not have adequate access to the various systems to really embark yet on such a project.

Comments

I am surprised by your comments. What did you expect the application to show? It will show you all the information available on WikiTree about your direct ancestors (granted, for some of the information on a person you will have to click through to a second page). It is not a research tool that will find information elsewhere, it is just a tool to navigate through the ancestors of a specific person on WikiTree, visualise their repeat ancestors, and view the relationships between the root person and a selection of other "persons of interest" in their ancestry.  I apologise if you were mislead somehow to expect more.

You say "you do not have adequate access to the various systems to really embark yet on such a project". What systems are you referring to and which project did you have in mind?

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Perhaps your app can be further developed to pass what data you know for a profile (a node) to Rob's sourcer extension to choose/initiate a search option.

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Perhaps. But that functionality is currently available with 2 (or is it 3?) clicks :) Click on a name, it opens the profile, click on the Sourcer link (if installed). :). So is it worth it? I would argue you would want to look at the complete profile before deciding exactly what you want/need to research further?

Answer 9

The latest revision of this app that was released into production today, has the following changes:

• More accurate birth and death dates (before, after, etc).
• Living people are not shown with death date "unknown" but as "Still living".
• 'Limit display' is adjusted to 'Max Gen' when the latter is changed but is re-adjusted to the max tree level after the tree has been loaded and/or before the tree is redrawn.
• Shift-click on leaf node will expand the branch to all data loaded.
• Connecters correctly displays birth and death data.
• User selected options are saved to and retrieved from a cookie, so they are remembered across sessions.
• Negative Ids (i.e. private profiles) higher up the tree are now handled correctly.
• Added a floating horizontal scroll bar.
• Some print improvement
• Updated help text re scrolling.
• Draggability was removed in favour of floating scrolling buttons since the former's interaction with scrolling caused less user-friendly behaviours. The floating scroll bars are still in place.