Ancestor+

Ancestor+

Entering data

If you still have the Royal Family database loaded, click MENU over the main window and the main menu will appear. Select the bottom item on this menu, 'Clear Dbase' to clear the current file. You will now be presented with a blank window.

Creating a person

First you will need people to work with. Click the '+' button on the main button bar and the 'Add new person' window will open. The caret will appear in the first field in this window, 'Surname'. Type Smith and press RETURN. The caret will move to the next field, 'Forenames'. Type John and press RETURN again. We shall ignore the 'Bynames' field for the moment, so press RETURN once more to move the caret to the 'Sex' field. Type M for Male, and press RETURN until the caret is in the 'Birth date' field, There are two fields, but for now press RETURN again to bypass the first and move to the second (right hand) field and type 12-4-1952. When this is done and the window looks like the illustration click on 'Add' at the top. If you want to alter any of the fields just click the mouse over the one you want to add to or change so the caret appears there. When you click on 'Add' John Smith's details are entered into the database and he will appear in the main window. You will see that his age is calculated and appears to the right of the 'Date of Birth' field. As we haven't entered a 'Date of Death' he is assumed to be still alive.

John Smith's box will now have appeared at the centre of the window, showing the details we've entered, name, year of birth, and the fact that he's Male and 47 years old.

Above John Smith's box are his parents boxes. We haven't entered anything about them so they are shown as 'Not Recorded', but they must exist, so their boxes exist.

We have entered rather minimal data to describe a person, but it's enough for the present. In fact only two items are essential, a name (at least three characters) and the sex, M or F. If you don't know the name, eg. when you have no information but you know someone existed as a link between two other people, then you could enter 'Unknown' or a made-up reference to identify the person until you have more data.

Creating a Family

Now we have invented John Smith, and as genealogy is all about relationships we shall give him some people to relate to.

Click on '+' again and enter in the Surname, Forename, Sex and Date of Birth fields respectively Brown, Mary, F, 4-7-1955. Click on 'Add' and Mary Brown will appear. This time we're going to create another person straight away, so click on the '+' again and enter the next person as Smith, David, M, 3-11-1974. Click on 'Add' once more, and then close this window.

The numbers at the left of the button bar show that we are looking at person number 3 (David Smith) and there are three people in the database. You can use the < and > buttons to move between them. We shall now link these three people as a family.

Click the '=' button to the right of the '+' button and the 'Add new family' window will open. Click the '<' button on the main window's button bar until John Smith, appears. We shall now 'marry' him to the second person, Mary Brown. Click on the number at the bottom right of his 'box' and drag the icon to the red writable icon in the centre left of the Add new family window. His name and details will appear. Now use the '>' button on the main widow until Mary Brown appears. Drag her number to the red writable icon on the centre right of the Family window and her details will appear there. Now click on the 'Add' button and they will be linked as a 'Family'. You will see that the main window has changed to show the new arrangement.

Linking a child

Having linked John Smith and Mary Brown we link their child.

Click on the blue Family Number between John Smith and Mary Brown to open their Family window. Use the '>' button on the main window button bar until David Smith appears. In the centre at the bottom of the Family window is a blue writable icon. Drag David Smith's number to this and his number will appear in the icon. Now click the '+' button to the left of this icon (or press RETURN with the caret in the writable icon). David Smith's number will vanish from the icon and you will see that the 'Children' icon at the bottom right of the window now shows the figure 1.

As before, to enter the new data into the database you must click the 'Update' button. You now have a basic 'family' of three people, two parents and a child.

If you want to add someone as an adopted rather than a 'natural' child you should click on the 'Adopted' button so that it is selected before you click on the '+' button.

To the right of the icon showing the number of children is a menu button. Click on this and a menu will appear showing the names and numbers of all the children in the family. With the example this will have just one entry, '3 David Smith'. If David Smith had descendants of his own then there would be a 'bullet' between his number and his name. If he had been adopted there would be a letter 'A' after his number. You can get even more information about the children because if you click on any of the names on this menu their Details window will open.

Although I have described the way of adding people to a family by dragging their numbers you can just type the number into the relevant icons. Dragging is less error prone because you can actually see the person's details in the main window.

Date checking

When people are linked as partners or children added to a family, checks are made to see that the dates, where known, are 'reasonable'. For example, the date of birth of a child would be checked against the date of birth of the mother, and if the mother was considered too young or too old a warning will be given. All the parameters can be set by he user, (see the section on the main Choices window) so if, for example, you are using Ancestor+ to record the pedigree of your dogs you won't get incessant warnings telling you that the mother was only four years old when a child was born!

Although checks are carried out when data is entered, there may be times when you want to verify it at a later date, for example, if a date was amended or a hitherto unknown date entered. The '?' button on the button bar will check all the dates to ensure that they fit within the parameters you have specified. If no errors or a single error is found then the normal message window will appear to tell you. If there are several errors it would be tedious to have a series of messages so they will be recorded and a 'SaveAs' window will appear. You can then save the list of errors and examine them at your leisure.

APDL