Charts — Everyone (All-in-One) Charts

Some genealogy programs offer an "everyone" chart — sometimes called an "all-in-one" chart — which places every person in the file on a single sheet. Pedigree Forge deliberately does not. This page explains why, and describes the approaches that work better in practice, including how to build a curated combined chart when several families really do belong on one sheet.

Why there is no everyone chart

A descendant chart is a tree, and a tree can always be laid out with no crossing lines. The same is true of an ancestor chart. A whole family file, however, is not a tree: every marriage joins two otherwise unrelated families, so a chart of everyone — unlimited descendants of an unlimited number of ancestors — is a network. Beyond a handful of families, a network cannot be drawn without lines crossing lines, and no layout, however clever, can prevent it. An everyone chart does not solve this problem; it prints it. The result is a sheet that is technically complete but practically unreadable — the eye loses each line of descent at every crossing.

There is a second, quieter cost. Where two lines meet at a marriage, a crossing can be avoided only if the shared person sits at the edge of their sibling group, next to the joining line — and in most real situations that means re-ordering a family’s children out of their birth order. On a professional chart, children appear strictly in birth order; re-ordering them is something of a cardinal sin, done reluctantly and one family at a time, where a particular join earns it. A chart of everyone forces the choice at almost every marriage: shuffle the children wholesale, or let the lines cross.

What to do instead

Genealogists solved this problem on paper long before software, and the convention is followed by the classic manuals recommended in Getting Started:

• Group descent by surname. A drop-line descendant chart follows a single surname line. Daughters appear with their marriages, and their children continue on the chart for the other family’s surname line.
• Show ancestry in a format designed for ancestry. A birth brief — the modern successor to the traditional seize quartiers — presents a person’s ancestors compactly and without crossings, as does a fan chart or an ancestor chart.
• Centre a sheet on a key person with a hybrid chart. A hybrid chart shows one person’s ancestors above and their descendants below on a single sheet — the closest thing to "everyone around this person" that remains a tree, and so can still be drawn without crossings. The Hybrid With Siblings variant widens the view to include the person’s siblings and their descendants, which for most families captures everyone a reader would actually look for.
• Link the sheets. Charts can be connected with from arrows and "to text" stops so a reader can follow a person from one sheet to the next.

In a large project, then, you should expect to produce several charts, of different kinds — one descendant chart per surname line, a birth brief or fan for ancestry, a hybrid chart centred on a key individual — each chosen for what it shows best, and each presenting its part of the data cleanly enough to be understood by its intended audience. A set of charts is not a compromise; it is the finished form.

Curating a combined chart

Sometimes two or three families genuinely belong on one sheet — most often because they converge on a marriage, or because you want to show where a spouse who married into the family came from. For this, Pedigree Forge lets a descendant chart start from multiple people, merging the shared person into a single entry where the lines meet. The key to a good result is curation: you choose which lines appear and where they join, rather than letting the whole file spill onto the page.

1. Create a descendant chart starting from the senior ancestor of your main surname line, as usual.
2. Add the second line’s ancestor as the 2nd start person on the General tab, under Advanced Parameters.
3. If the two lines reach the shared couple at different generations, set an Offset so that the couple sits on a single row.
4. Where the same person appears in both lines side by side, they are merged into one entry automatically. Merging works best when the shared person is the first sibling in their family — if they are not, consider reordering the siblings. Do so reluctantly: strict birth order is the convention on a professional chart, and worth departing from only where the join earns it. This, again, is why curating a few chosen lines beats combining many — every extra line tends to demand another such departure.
5. To show a married-in spouse’s origins within the chart rather than from the top, use the Insert after box beneath the extra start person, so their family is placed beside the marriage itself.
6. Keep each line focused on its path to the join. Use *Stop at me* and "to text" stops to trim branches that would wander away from the story the chart is telling.

Two or three chosen lines, converging by design, give you the part of an everyone chart that was worth having — on a sheet that stays readable.