Having a problem switching over from tree view to marking screen while trying to mark descendants of all earliest ancestors? Let Aarnie help you do this. Aarnie is a bogus character who you temporarily enter into your database. Each time you find and highlight an early ancestor in your tree view, click on the +p button and link that early ancestor as a child of Aarnie. After you get them all linked as children of Aarnie, then go to the marking screen and mark all the descendants of Aarnie. Voila!! All the kin of the original focus person are suddenly marked! But before you click on OK to construct the gedcom file or report or whatever, first go and unmark Aarnie and then he along with the bogus child links disappear from the marked people. And after you finish the exercise you can delete Aarnie from your database and all is as it was before. (Or, if you're worried about polluting your good database you could restore a backup to a temporary folder, work with that copy of your database and delete the whole thing when you're through). Why is his name Aarnie with no surname nor other data except M for male? Because that puts him first in the select person list and he is already highlighted whenever you go to link children to him. Wayne League