Hello everybody. On today's genealogy tutorial I will be
discussing how to navigate the world Family Tree on Geni.com. For today's
example I will be using Abraham Lincoln's family tree and will be
viewing it in what's known as the flash family tree. Now there's two family trees
that you can view on Geni; the flash tree and the HTML tree. The
flash tree requires Flash software to be able to use it. The benefit to this is
that you have more ability to manipulate the view of the family tree so that you
can better understand it. now if you don't have flash you can still use the
HTML version of the family tree, you just have less options with it. Now to look at
the different parts of the family tree all you really have to do starting out
is click and drag so if we want to look over here, all we have to do is just
click and drag and we will see what's on this part of the family tree and you can
also go a little bit faster by clicking one of these arrows there's one on the
left one on the top one on the right and one on the bottom and you can also use
these arrows down here so if I click this arrow scroll left the same thing if
I click this arrow if I want to click this I can go right or I can click this
to go right this just allows you to navigate a little bit more smoothly
throughout the tree now if you get a little lost in the family tree and you
want to get back to what's known as the focal person or the person where the
family tree is based around you want to go to this little picture on the bottom
left now this little picture will be the
picture of your focal person and when you click that it takes you right back
to them now once you're back to this person if you want to change the focal
person you can do that in a few ways you can either click the tree link down
here so if we wanted you Mary Todd Lincoln's tree we can
click this little tree link right here or this little green tree with this plus
8 7 4 now what this 874 stands for is that if
we click this they're going to be 874 people that we will view in Mary Todd
Lincoln's family tree that we weren't viewing before in Abraham Lincoln's
family tree and so if we look back over at Abraham Lincoln now it says 1882 so
we can click that to view his tree or we can just click this button and that
takes us to make him the focal point of the tree now viewing the world family
tree on geni is really cool because family trees are not three dimensional
or four dimensional or five dimensional they're infinitely dimensional people
have married all sorts of other people they've had all sorts of kids who then
had kids with other people and the connection between everyone in the world
are quite amazing and having this world family tree where all of these trees can
be merged into one really makes it so that you can see how connections are a
lot closer than we think but back to actually just navigating the tree now
those are some of the basic parts but the advanced parts really come down to
these three little buttons down here navigate go to and preferences if we
click navigate this is just gonna give us a big overview of the tree in one
small little picture so this is the entire family tree for Abraham Lincoln
and one little picture now this is all based on the Preferences of how our
views are right now which we'll go over in a bit on how to change those now if
we want to go to a specific person in the family tree and we know them by name
but aren't quite sure which way to go to get there you can click go to and it's
going to load every single person in the family tree by name so if we want to go
to a specific person so let's look up someone here let's see so let's fine
one of the Lincoln's so let's say Mary Elizabeth Lincoln so if we want to find
her we just click that and it takes us right to her and you can do that with
anybody so here we want to find Robert Lincoln there we go
takes us right to him so if you know them it just does it by last name so if
you want to go to the W's you can click the W here or the Z and every once in
awhile you might get some numbers or you might have other languages and you'll
find those towards the end you may also find some different people with
punctuation or question marks so you'll have all sorts of variants with this now
the third part this is where you really get to manipulate the tree so that you
can better research it and understand it and that's our preferences now there's a
lot to it but the big piece is over here on the left this allows you to change
how many generations you can view it goes all the way up to 19 and then after
you get to 19 it goes to all, but that usually takes a long time to load and
sometimes it'll time out if it's too large of a tree. Usually ones that are
connected to the biblical tree. So once we choose how many generations we want
it's going to reload that family tree with that amount of generations now
what's really great about being able to manipulate the family tree this way is
you can really get a better idea of the tree in certain ways so let's say we
really want to view the tree of Abraham Lincoln but in a way where we're really
only seeing him his kids and his ancestors we can bring his descendants
down to one and that's basically just going to show one generation of
descendants which are his children so this is now going to bring it up where
we're going to see just Abraham Lincoln and his children on top of that we can
actually see the children of his siblings as well and it's going to show
his aunts and uncles their children and their grandchildren now the reason why
it's gonna show the children and grandchildren of his aunts and uncles is
because it's showing they're descendants to the same
generation is one descendant below him so one generation below him so we're
going to get all of that but let's say that we really don't want all of this
extraneous stuff with his siblings and their kids and his cousins and their
kids all we really want is Abraham Lincoln his kids and his ancestors well
we go back to preferences and we go to direct ancestors only so once we click
the direct ancestors only button this is going to make it so that all we're going
to see is the focal person of our tree which is Abraham Lincoln his children
and his ancestors and this is going to show the ancestors up to ten generations
as we've indicated so we can view a whole bunch of them but let's say we
want to view just a few a few generations we really want to get a view
of his family as he knew it and a lot of the ancestors that he knew by name so
here we have Abraham Lincoln his parents and his grandparents and his kids and so
we can keep manipulating the family tree and different ways just by using these
generations so we can view it in different ways now we can go back and
unclick direct ancestors and now we have it so that we are
viewing Abraham Lincoln his parents his children his siblings and their children
his aunts and uncles their children and their grandchildren now some other
pieces in the Preferences area are the tree layout where you can just change
the way the tree layout looks and this is mostly aesthetics personally I really
enjoy the standard but you have vertical you have your names only photos only and
standards my preference and with each one there's different layout options so
in standard you can show photos or you can make it so you don't see photos you
can do what's known as flip nodes where if you flip nodes what that means is
that you go over the profile and it's going to flip the node and show you all
that information so here we're getting married Todd Lincoln sometimes it takes
a little while to load personally I'm not the biggest fan of flip nodes and
with flip nodes you can make it where you have to click it to flip so
sometimes it takes a little while to load for things so always let things
load but so if we're hovering over it's not going to do it but if we click it
then there we go the node is going to flip as per se so going back to
preferences I like to take that off now here we also have show yellow arrows
that's these yellow arrows that's how you add more people to the family tree
if you do what I didn't you click an arrow on someone who's not the focal
point sometimes it'll make them the focal point but here we can add a
brother or sister or another spouse we can add a child or we can add a parent
but if you want to take those yellow arrows out for just aesthetic reasons
you can do that make a look a little nicer show email prompt is if someone is
living there will be a little email prompt right here saying you can type in the
email. If you don't want to see that you can just unclick it
and you won't see them. this is just gonna reload real quick so there we go
so if you unclick that so I'm gonna click it back and it's gonna load back
now the other things you can either Center your single parents if you
unclick it then what it'll do is the women will be over towards the right the
men will be over towards the left such as you see here
woman over to the right and over to the left but let's say if and weren't there
and all we knew was Brigid or General Robert Smith Todd then he would actually
be right here in the middle if we do center single parents so that's what
that means it'll mark deceased that actually marks the profile as deceased
and you'll see that as this little black bar going across over the picture so if
we click that you'll notice the little black bars disappear and if we click
that again they reappear so that's just indicating that they are deceased we can
also do neutral color backgrounds if you just want to make a little bit easier on
your computer color for whatever reason you can do that
there's also open profiles a new window if you have that unclick and you open a
new profile that's going to open it in this same window so you're gonna lose
where you are in the tree I prefer to have open profiles in a new window
because that way when I click on a profile it's going to open it in a new
tab
now this is just one part of the Preferences and that's the display
preferences we also have named preferences so this is going to make it
how the names are displayed I'm not going to go through each piece because
they're all fairly straightforward you have reverse right-to-left names
you also have do not guess last names you have show middle name show suffixes
ignore display names all just all sorts of different options revisions this is
going to show you the revision history display preferences when the family
trees edited a revision is noted and so you can see the revisions for 28 14 7 3
or just within the last day or you can just hide the revision icons altogether
now the advanced over here is going to be your font sizes so for anyone who has
trouble reading the family tree you can increase the font size minimum font size
a maximum font size or just the different sizes of each so if we do
minimum font size to 10 it's going to bring all the small font up to 10 and if
we do the maximum font sizes it'll just change that we can also change date
format so if you prefer the American style month month date year year year
you can do that or you can do day month year or your month day you can also
change your rendering quality so if you're having trouble loading the world
family tree you can lower the quality so that you can have it load a lot faster
if you keep having it time out where you're trying to view the tree lowering
that quality may help you get what you're needing now if you end up doing a
whole bunch of changes and don't like it and aren't sure how to go back you can
always go to advanced and go to restore defaults and this is going to restore
all the defaults for preferences thank you so much for checking out my
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