2010-05-19 Fan Chart Plus
fan chart
Chart Size
A fan chart is compact way to present an ancestry. Just as with other presentations of ancestry, such as an ahnentafel or an ahnenlist, it is customary to present all known ancestors up to a certain number of generations, and an n-generation fan chart does so in an aesthetically pleasing way.
A fan chart provides a good overview of ancestry, and that makes it a great choice to present all known ancestors; you immediately see where the holes in the ancestral research are. This works fine when your research spans just a few generations, but a fan chart for a large number of generations has considerable space demands.
Printing a large fan chart is largely a matter of finding a balance between an affordable print size and a readable font size - and if you really want to print all known ancestors, the longest ancestral determines the numbers of generations in the fan.
Extended Fan Chart
If most lines are nine or ten generations long, but you have one fourteen-generation line, you need a 14 generation fan chart to print it all. That is ridiculous.
Extend Fan Chart introduced one practical innovation, the
extended fan chart. A fan chart has several possible layouts, the Half Disk is
merely the most popular one, but each layout leaves large parts of the
rectangular canvas unused. Often, the one or two lines that are a few
generations longer than all the other ones will fit perfectly if you allow their
boxes to be present without demanding boxes for every possible ancestor
in the same ancestral generations, to extend the fan chart with just the boxes
that are needed, as long as these fit on the paper.
This fan chart innovation not difficult to implement, and software vendors love
to claim they beat all their competitors by being first with something new, so
support for extended fan charts seems a matter of time.
As the extensions are clamped in between other boxes, some application might even allow a bit more resizing control over boxes in extensions a bit, allowing you to either reduce their size to fit in an extra box or to increase their size to fit more or larger content.
Fan Chart Plus
The concept of an extended fan chart already enables fitting more ancestors on the same size canvas, and provides an excellent solution for many cases where there are just a few lines that are few generations longer than the rest.
However, it isn't a solution for all such cases and it certainly isn't a
solution for the fairly common case of a fan chart where most lines are nine,
ten or eleven generations long, but there is one forty-generation line back to
Carolus the Great.
For such cases, the traditional fan chart is hopeless inadequate. You could
create a ten-generation chart, but the Carolus line would not fit, and an
extension could show only a few generations of that line. You could create a
forty-generation fan chart - or perhaps a 35-generation fan chart with a
five-generation extension - but it would be mostly empty.
The solution for such cases is the Fan Chart Plus; a fan chart plus
something extra, a fan chart plus another chart.
This drawing shows an fan chart with extensions and additions. The basic fan
chart is shown is light yellow, as are the additional charts, and the extensions
are light green. There is some overlap between the extended fan chart and the
additions, and this is shown in light blue.
I used these colours to highlight different elements of the drawing. I do not
suggest using a colour scheme like this when printing a real chart.
Once again, the drawing is based on Legacy Charting. The fan chart is printed
over two sheets of A4 in landscape mode. On that size, Legacy Charting will
print a six-generation fan chart, but the extensions allow several lines of
seven and eight generations, with plenty of room to spare. Several nine or ten
generation lines could be supported. Two additional charts are used to support
even longer lines.
The one on the left is in support of an eleven-generation line, and the one on
the right is in support of an 14-generation line, and could easily support more.
Having an overlap of one generation is an easily understood way to make it clear which additional chart connects where. A slightly different background colour is one possible way to highlight that the line does not end there, but continues in an additional chart.
typical line
Of course, those additional lines are unlikely to be a simple chain of
couples as shown in the first drawing. The second drawing shows what a
typical line might look like.
The longest line is likely to be a male line of descent. It likely that
sometimes the wife's name is not even know, and in many other cases the only
other thing know about the wife will be name of her father.
software
A line like this can be drawn as a conventional chart, but the drawing algorithm probably needs a bit of tweaking to make sure it draws a tall, slim diagram.
How difficult adding support for an additional chart type on the canvas of a fan chart is depends on the technical architecture of the charting software.
conclusion
The extended fan chart can accommodate a few ancestral lines that are longer than most, and a fan chart plus - a fan chart plus another chart - can accommodate ancestral lines that are significantly longer than most other ones.
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