Genealogical no-no? Graphically impossible?

[Steve Rothman]

I'm a genealogy newbie as well as a PGV newbie, so please forgive me.

I've set up PGV on my site and have been happily using it to type in facts about my family. I've got about 60 people in, I know that's small potatoes to a lot of you! Anyway, everyone I've put in is related to me or is related to someone who is related to me. However, I can't find a way to chart everyone at one time. In other words, there is no person that is either ancestor or descendant to everyone else.

I feel like, with a pencil and paper, I could hand-draw a messy chart of these 60 people and how they are all related. But isn't there some way in PGV to do that? Or can I take the GEDCOM file that PGV has created and use some other software to print such a chart?

I'm sure such a chart would be hard to arrange - lots of lines pointing in various ways, and representing it on a small piece of paper would mean all the details would be small. Maybe it would look like a complicated circuit diagram.  But isn't this the kind of thing a computer could do? Or is it really much more complicated than I realize? Or is this kind of thing totally foreign to normal people doing genealogy?

[Stephen Arnold]

Steve
You have no indicated the extent of the relationships - only as you did say, "related to me or is related to someone who is related to me"

Therein lies the problem with charting - its the ' related to someone who is related to me' that creates the biggest problem in charting.

Take a look at the INTERACTIVE TREE for displaying people directly related to you (wife, children, parents, etc) but again, this can't handle your wife's parents or siblings, etc.  While you could draw something on paper - frankly it would be a mess, especially when you have people with 4 or 5 marriages and children by 2 or 3 of those, and their spouses parents and grandparents and children and their spouses and….. well, I think you get the picture - there is no picture.
-Stephen

[Thomas52]

Once logged in, go to an individual and look at "Options for Individual" and "Charts."
Then play with "Relationship Chart"and "Pedigree."  Then try the "Hourglass" and the "Interactive Tree" (again under "Charts.")
Then look at the same functions for some of our larger trees using PGV.
I think once you realize what PGV can do, then you will understand what it cannot (realistically) do.

[antiqueone]

I've tried to do this but with phpgedview it is not possible. The equivelant of Family Tree Maker "all in one tree" doesn't exist.