Thursday, November 8, 2012

Fan Chart

My parents are celebrating their 65 Wedding Anniversary with us this weekend. All my siblings and spouses are meeting up in Salt Lake City for a memorable time together. We start by attending a symphony which represents the love of music that my parents have shared on a daily basis from the time they met in the 7th grad up until today.

The next morning we are all going to a temple session in the SLC Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This wonderful couple was married in this temple in September of 1947.
AMAZING! Their love of the gospel of Jesus Christ is another thing that they have been able to happily share throughout every day of their marriage.
Lastly, we are meeting up with more of the extended family at a restaurant in Orem for a nice lunch/dinner (linner) later that day. Again, their love of family is one of the great things in my parents life, and they have shared it well.

I was able to make a genealogy poster for them that looks like the picture above. It was surprisingly easy to do because my ancestors are already in the data base.  So, if you have your ancestors information already it will be easy, if you don't then there will be a LOT of investigating to do before you can have a chart like this one.
Big shout out to all my family members, (mostly ones from the generation preceding mine) who took their time to find all these ancestors for us.  You did a terrific job.

You can't see this chart very well because of it's size and the small names in all the blanks, but a little explanation of it is that the fathers side is on the right with his father in blue and his mothers side in various shades of green as the families come together. The red and yellow sides are the different generations and names of my mothers family up to the 6th great grandfathers and mothers. It will be fun to compare what we know and remember of these names and places where they came from. The dates of birth are included up until the 4th great grandparents.
I increased the regular 8.5 x 11" size to a large 24" x 36" poster and found a frame for it so it will be easier to look at.

So in short, here is what I had to do to get this chart completed.
Quick rundown:

*Go up to    LDS.org     and under "Resources" click on family history. I signed in and found my grandparents names already there. I plugged in my name and up came all my connections back several generations. You DO NOT have to be a member of the LDS church to use this site.

*Now go to create fan.com and login, then click on "Create".

Walla !!!!!!   It appears, all filled in (except some of the 8th and 9th generation names that no one has found yet.)

It just APPEARS!

*I then downloaded the complete chart, converted it to JPEG for the printer and took it to Walgreens Drug Store to have it made into a poster. You could order it online and just download it to their site or Costco, or any photo center, but I wasn't sure what size I wanted, so I went in to the store. I picked them because they were having a 40% off on enlarging. So it cost me 40% of $29.95.
Not bad for a couple hours of my time.

And did you hear me when I said "It just appears?" I really didn't even do anything.
AWESOME.  My parents will love it. Looking at these names all in one nice concise place.

2 comments:

  1. What a cool gift! Have tons of fun with the family!

    =)

    ReplyDelete
  2. My mom would love something like this, too. I'm taking notes.

    ReplyDelete