----- Original Message ----- From: VPierce851@aol.com To: ancestry@optonline.net ; FAMILY-ORIGINS-USERS-L@rootsweb.com Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 9:18 AM Subject: Re: [FO] Ancestor Book >If you use the "Descending Book" it works just fine. It will list everyone - >half-sisters & brothers, even adopted children. It is just when you try to >go up from a certain person that it only lists those from whom you descend. >In my case, I have eight half brothers and sisters. If I start with my name >and go up the scale to my ggggrandfather, it will only show "MY" ancestors >and will not show any of my half-siblings. I don't see how Bruce could make >it do so. By programming FO to generate a report including the information on other spouses and half-siblings such as I suggested in my first post. I know of no technical reason such a report would be impossible. It simply needs to be programmed to make it possible. I only ask that an ancestor report for ME show MY ancestors. But I want it to show EVERY spouse of those ancestors and EVERY child of those ancestors, without my having to enter that information by hand. That's what computers are for. It's as simple as that. I am not descended from my uncles and aunts, and yet the ancestor report shows them perfectly happily, because they are the children of TWO of my ancestors. I want the report to show ALL of the children of EACH ancestor, even when these children are the result of other marriages, or non-mariages, as the case may be. :-) (No children out of wedlock in recent generations that I know of, but my medieval ancestors were a randier bunch apparently.) That does not strike me as an unreasonable request. The information is in the database. All that's needed is the permission of the ahnentafel police to allow that information to be put automatically where I want to put it. Saying that I can add it in an RTF is to say that I cannot use my computer for the purposes that computers exist--the manipulation of information--when it comes to putting data into a genealogical report that contains the word "ancestor" in its title, unless the ahnentafel police agree. I say the hell with that. >I tried going back to my ancestor, using my youngest grandchild. It only >printed "HIS" ancestors, which did not include any of my half-siblings. >If you start with the oldest ancestor and go down to the present, it will >show everyone in your computer that is related to that ancestor. I know that I can have a print out of these people in a descendent report. The problem is I want to see these people MENTIONED--their existence acknowledged--in an ANCESTOR report. I don't want it said that they are my ancestors, they are not. I just want ALL of the children and ALL of the spouses of my ancestors listed in an ancestor report that discusses, sometimes at length, the lives of these ancestors. Why is that once I enter into my database that an ancestor collected tea cozies, I can have that information placed, automatically, in an ancestor report, a descendant report, in a grocery list if FO generated reports called grocery lists. But the fact that my great grandfather had a second wife CANNOT, MUST NOT be automatically included in a report called Ancestor? Why the hell not? My great grandfather is my ancestor. I want the information about his second wife in the report along side the fact that he collected tea cozies (which he didn't, by the way, he collected notably high golf scores instead). JSG