Family History System
Reports Documenting Relatives of
John Fitzgerald KENNEDY
This folder contains several reports with information about 112 of your relatives in my Kennedy Family File. That Family File and the reports were created using a software product, the Family History System, that I've worked on over the past 30 years or so. I thought you might find these interesting.Click on any of the underlined texts below to open one of the documents.
NOTE: All relationship labels in these reports are relative to you. (With the two exceptions of the descendant reports for a distant ancestor.)
Summary Reports - These are reports that summarize information in different ways, grouping records according to some criteria and then reporting statistics for the groups.
- Relationship Summary Table - This report shows the number of your relatives in each "relationship category" (Parents, children, grands, Uncles and Aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins of various degrees). The groups are presented in an array, with position in the array based upon a common "ancestor's generation level" (AGL) and the "relative's generation level" (RGL) compared to your own. You and your Ancestors are counted along the diagonal going from lower left to upper right. The entries below an ancestor group entry record the Descendants of the siblings of their children who are among your ancestors.
Note: The labels used in the above table are the ones used in the other reports below. There is another set of commonly used labels shown in this Table. The other reports could, optionally, be produced with these labels.
- Surname Summary Reports: These are sorted lists of the last names among your relatives. Summary information for each surname includes the numbers of Males and Females, Birth Dates recorded (and range), Birth Places recorded, Death Dates recorded (and range), etc. (NOTE: an * next to a Total of males and females indicates that there is one or more with that surmame whose gender is not entered into the file.)
This report is provided in two formats:
- Surname Summary where the Surname is the Last Name at birth, as recorded in the family file.
- Married Surname Summary which uses the (most recent) husband's surname for wives. This may add some other surnames that were introduced by marriage but may not be a birth surname of any relative if there were no children from the marriage.
- Relationship Summary Reports: These are similar to the Surname Summary Reports in format, but instead of summarizing by Surname, they summarize by generation level of Ancestry or Descendancy.
- Ancestor Summary which shows information about the generations of your ancestors.
- Descendant Summary which shows information about the generations of descendants of one of your distant ancestors.
Detail Lists - These are reports that list information about each relative, usually things like Name, Birth/Death dates and places, etc. The order in which they are listed is a significant feature. It could be a simple list sorted by a name (Last or first) or date (e.g. year of birth), such as the following:
But perhaps the most interesting are ones that are ordered "by relationship". The reports below are of that type.
- Ancestor Alphabetic List - This is a list of all of your ancestors in surname sequence. This list includes some seldom reported items in the RID, FID, MID and SPID fields that show the actual numbers for the ancestor's own, Father's, Mother's and most recent Spouse's name record in the Family File. They are used here to show the Relationships among the alphabetic sequenced names. The "Root Ancestors" are the ones whose father and mother IDs are zero.
Report Indexes - A detail report INDEX is a list of the names of individuals in the detail report where the information for the name includes a list of page and line number entries for each place the name appears in the detail list. Each relative is also shown with a label indicating their relationship to you. If there is no relationship, then it is a Spouse or parent of a spouse of a relative. The following reports are Indexes to the detail reports above.
- Ancestor Report - This is a list of all of your ancestors in a "relationship" sequence. The "AGL" or "Ancestor Generation Level" is the number of generations that ancestor is separated from you.
The ancestors are numbered by an LNUM, or Lineage Number or Ahnentafel number. This number starts with 1 (for you), 2 for your father and 3 for your mother, and then a father's number is always 2 times that of the ancestor child and the mother's is one more than that. Thus, all male ancestor's have an even LNUM and all female ancestors have an odd LNUM. Given an ancestor's LNUM, the LNUM for the "ancestor child" is found by dividing it by 2 (discarding any remainder of 1). The Ancestor Lineage Box Chart, described later, shows graphically the meaning of these numbers.
- Descendant Report
- This is a list of the Descendants counted in the "Descendant Summary" report above. They are listed in an "Outline" format that emphasizes the increasing level of descendancy.
- Family Sequenced Relative Report: This is a list of all of your relatives in my file, in "family" order. That is, starting with each ancestor, it lists all descendants of that ancestor following the ancestor's entry. The further descendants of each child are shown before going to the next sibling/child. All descendants of an ancestor are shown before proceding to the next ancestor.
The LNUM or Lineage Number is as described for the Ancestor Report above. The RGL (Relative Generation Level) column shows the number of generations this relative is separated from your own.
The information is in "outline" format with offsets increasing as they progress down a line of descendany. NOTE: if a relative is repeated in the report, there is a "back reference" of the form ">pp ll" where pp=page-number and ll=line-number of the last previous reference. That relative's descendants will only be shown for the first occurence of the relative in the report.
- Generation Sequenced Relative Report: This report groups descendants by "generation level" instead of in Families. Thus, all children will be listed, then all grand children, etc. The "Descendancy" numbers show the "child number" links between a descendant back up the line of parentage to the ancestor. This is similar to the organization of the REGISTER Report below. The RNUM (Relative Number) is a sequence number assigned to the first occurence of each relative in the report. This is the same as the "Family Group" number in the Relative REGISTER report below. (Note: I have printed this without spouse(s), birth/death places and comments to simplify the appearance and emphasize the grouping and sequencing.)
- Indexes to the Family Sequenced Relative Report
Surname Sequenced Index
Married Surname Index
First Name Index using the Married last name for wives.
- Indexes to the Generation Sequenced Relative Report
Surname Sequenced Index - This index is shorter because the report didn't include the spouse(s).
First Name Index using the Married last name for wives.Family Group Reports - The "Family Group" is a commonly used method of gathering and recording family information, where a group consists of the "Subject", the subject's father and mother, spouse(s), spouse's father and mother, and the subject's children. Basic information includes such items as birth, marriage and death dates and places of each but may contain other information related to the subject, such as addresses, notes etc. At the beginning of the "data gathering" process, this information might be recorded on 3x5 cards kept in a box, or on sheets of paper kept in loose-leaf binders. The following report is a basic form for gathering data for entry into a family file with my program:
Family Group Report Form - you will note that this allows for entering information on Education, Medical, Military and Occupation as well as relevant addresses and comments. There is actually no practical limit to the number of occurrences of each in an individual's family record of the family file. Note that there is a "hint" about the extended family by the number of children entered for each child. The identity of those grandchildren would be on the Family Group form for the child.
Family REGISTER Report: This is another list of your relatives in a format that is commonly used for family booklets. It has both an Ancestor Section showing basic information (birth, death dates and places) for each known ancestor (sequenced by Lineage Number), and a Descendant Section that reports on the descendants of each ancestor. Each relative is represented by a "Family Group" report that may include all inormation about the individual in the family file. The group reports are numbered sequentially as they appear in the report. Unlike the Relative report that lists relatives in "family order", in a Register report, these family reports are grouped by the descendant's generation level as in the Relationship Table and the alternate form of the Relative report presented earlier.Your "Family Group" Report - This is a "filled in" report that shows your full "data record" from my Family File. This is the way that you might share some basic information about an individual with a family member or interested person. It can be printed in Fixed Format like the blank form above or in Free Format which presents information in "paragraph" style and allows using a larger font size.
As more and more records of family groups are created, there becomes the problem of organizing them in some logical fashion. When ordering the family groups of the descendants of a single ancestor, it is reasonable to put the children's information together (in sequence), then the grand-children's (in sequence of parent and siblings), etc...that is, to group them by "generation" of descendancy (like the "Generation Sequenced Relative Report" described previously). A generalization of this for "Family Group Reports" of relatives is the "Family REGISTER".
In the Ancestor Section of the REGISTER, each ancestor's name is preceded by the "Lineage Number" followed by a number in parentheses. That is the number of the Family Group Report for the ancestor in the Descendant Section that follows. The children of the ancestors are not shown here...they will be shown in the Descendant Section.Family REGISTER Index This is a report that lists all names in the REGISTER report with the location (page and line number) of all entries in the report for that individual. As for the Relative Report, three different indexes are provided.The Descendant Section consists of a set of "Family Group Reports" for each family member, that is for each ancestor and each ancestor's descendants. The ancestors are in Lineage Number order and their descendants follow, grouped by generations.
In a family group report in this section, the children are numbered by lower case Roman numerals: i,ii,iii,iv,etc. To the left of that child's sequence number in the report is a sequence number of the child among the relatives in the generation grouping. If that number is preceded by a "+", then it is the number of a Family Group report for that child. The absence of the "+" means that there is no information about the child beyond what is in the parent's group report, and so there is not a separate family group report for that child.
In each Family Group Report in the REGISTER, to the right of the subject's name is a sequence that I call the "bloodline" of that relative. Similar to the "Descendancy" sequence in the "Generation Sequenced Relative Report". For an
Ancestor, this "Bloodline" is simply the Lineage Number in square brackets, e.g. [4] for the paternal grand-father. For a 1C1R, a great grandchild of a grandparent, the "bloodline" might be something like ........(i.18 Susan,ii.14 Arthur,i.13 Benjamin)[4].... which says that the person is: the first child of relative #18 named Susan, who is the second child of #14 named Arthur, who is the first child of #13 named Benjamin, who is the paternal grandfather [4].
Because there is much more information in each family group report than is provided in the line of information in the relative report, the types of references appearing in the REGISTER index are more varied and include: (*) for the subject of a family group, (F) the subject's father, (M) the subject's mother, (sp) a spouse, (sF) a spouse's father, (sM) a spouse's mother, (ch) a child and (cSp) a child's spouse.
- Indexes to the Family REGISTER Report
Surname Sequenced Index
Married Surname Index
First Name Index using the Married last name for wives.
Other Reports - There are other ways of looking at or presenting your family information including some graphical tools, two of the easiest to create are:
- The Ancestor Map - This is a little like a simple list of your ancestors, but they are linked together by lines representing the child to parent links. The name of each ancestor is preceded by the LNUM (Lineage Number) although it's easy to distinguish mothers and fathers graphically. Also all Paternal ancestors are above your entry and all Maternal ancestors are below.
- The Ancestor Lineage Box Chart - This is another graphical representation of your ancestors in 'Mini-box chart" format. This chart may be very wide and printed in several pages that can be placed side-by-side to view the entire chart. It is useful for following paternal (surname) or maternal lines. The number within the box is the LNUM (Lineage Number) of your ancestor. You can use that to locate the ancestor on the Ancestor Map or Register Report to find out more about that ancestor.
I hope you found much of interest among these materials. If you have any problems, questions, corrections or comments about any of this, or if you have additional information that you would like added, please contact me at:
Phillp E. Brown, 1975 Hickory Tree lane, Tallahassee, Fl, 32303
email: peb.talfl@gmail.com