Denver, CO NEWS Article Published: Sunday, November 02, 2003 Man's family tree spans 428 years By Jeannie Piper, 9News Post / Hyoung Chang Romeo Martin, center, of Denver discusses family history with his grandsons Mark Hrovat, 7, left, and Andrew Hrovat, 6, at Cook Park on Saturday.Romeo Martin laid out a game plan Saturday that included enough relatives to stretch across two football fields. Neither cold nor drizzle could stop the 72-year-old Martin from unrolling his 730-foot-long, 5-foot- wide family tree at Cook Park in southeast Denver. The blueprint was charted on a vinyl roll with pigmented ink. In 1/8- and 1/4-inch type, Martin has documented thousands of relatives: his parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, grandchildren, great-grandparents, great- great-grandparents. They are of French, Canadian and American descent. "I present the whole picture as nobody else does," Martin said a day before unveiling his masterpiece for the first time in his neighborhood. He's unrolled the chart twice since July at family reunions in Canada, but he wanted those a little closer to his home in Denver to see his family in a way that nobody has ever seen. "It's one of the longest charts in the world, as far as I can tell," he said. "I haven't run into anyone in the genealogy world who has printed out a chart this long." The retired electrical engineer started mapping his roots five years ago after seeing a family tree at a family reunion. For his, Martin used five thick volumes of paperwork put together by his cousins, some of whom are professional genealogists, to trace the origins of the Rene Martin family, starting in 1575, and the Jean Baptiste Labossiere family, his mother's side, from the early 1600s. Both families originated in France and immigrated to Quebec. "I show all the weddings, all the marriages and all the offspring from the marriages," he said, adding that conventional family trees just show the lineage of grandfathers. And unlike most family trees, Martin said, "You can't buy the software to make this chart." When Martin couldn't find a business to do the job, he created his own program and printing process. One by one, he types all the names into his computer and prints his so-called "Networking Chart of Cousins" out on a smaller, table-top scroll that's proofed and edited by his cousins. This mini- scroll is then incorporated into the bigger chart for the bigger picture that he says you can't get on a CD, yet. The best part of his creation is seeing his cousins coming together, and learning how the black, blue, brown and green lines on the tree connect them. On Saturday, a few of his family came out for the local unveiling. "It's great to have a grandpa who did this," said his grandson, Peter Hrovat, 11, who is visiting from Nebraska. Peter and his younger siblings helped their grandfather unroll the chart. The chore took two hours, but he didn't mind. "It's awesome," Peter said. Eventually, Hrovat and his cousins will pick up their grandfather's project. In the next two years, Martin plans to increase the type size for easier reading and add enough names to triple its current size. And he says the updated version will be available on a compact disc, for the computer generation who will be taking over - someday. Until then, he'll keep building his tree the old-fashioned way. "There's no limit as to how much you can add to the chart," Martin said. http://www.genealogysearch.org/news/index.html