Too amusing! I missed the live version of this as I was on a genealogy field trip in East Texas. But I caught the "I don't like the color orange." Spoken by a true Aggie!
Thank you Devon, a very helpful tutorial. I might even start to use the 8 great grandparent colouring approach as the tree collapse highlighting looks cool. I've used FTM for a while but haven't really got to grips with it or used any of the none obvious features.
I got real excited when you said FTM could do colors 'forward and backward'. So I wanted to buy the program for dna work, but I then realized I couldn't see anywhere it had a 'descendant view' like on Ancestry. My main problem is getting lost in all the descendants - but I just have to SEE how they all blend into each other! Is anything helpful for seeing all the descendants in downline mode? Lists and ahnentafels just don't cut it. Thanks.
It does? I was just thinking that FTM must have way more colors than Ancestry...which only has 24 colors to code your DNA matches with. Maybe I'm not following...?
I used color coding to see if my grandmother's Henderson line was related to a Henderson line that married in to another line of my grandmother's family. I was able to see clearly that they were not related to each other. I also used it to keep my 2 unrelated Jones lines separate.
I think I like Rootsmagic's color coding more. There are more colors and with the sets you can expand so much more. So while I would like the visual representation of multiple colors on the person, I think Rootsmagic is more versatile in the long run. But the pedigree collapse... Not that I have it in my lines but in matches lines it would be so nice to see.
Thank you Devon. Great explanation as always. Is there somewhere in FTM that you can note what you have used each colour for? or do we just keep a postit note on the side of the screen, lol. Thanks.
Sadly, there isn't a way in FTM to note the color scheme you used. Unless you want to add this as a note for the home person. But you might not remember that you added that note. This is one feature that RootsMagic does better.
