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About FOCUS PERSON & FOCUS COUPLE Family Histories
Copyright 2007-2013 by Ancestry Register LLC and Terry J. Booth
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All reproduction or reuse is prohibited, in whole or in part, without written permission of the author and Ancestry Register LLC.
| Every AncestryRegister.com Family History starts with a Focus Person or Focus Couple. A Focus Person or Focus Couple are oftentimes an ancestor of the Author themself.
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| Such histories usually take the familiar 'tree' shape associated with ancestral diagrams, in which an increasing number of people and family lines (i.e. its 'branches') are added the further back one goes. If the Focus Person or Focus Couple have several generations of descendants included in the family history, their descendants are akin to the roots of a tree, propogating ever more widely with each succeeding generation. The presence of multiple generations of both ancestors and descendants, since it possesses both many branches and many roots, is therefore often referred to as having an hourglass shape, with the Focus Person or Focus Couple being the single narrow 'in between' generation.
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| There is also a third format, but its use is primarily associated with a Focus Person or Focus Couple whose ancestors cannot be traced any earlier. Called a 'descendant tree', it is akin to the bottom half of the hourglass form. The 'descendant tree' form is generally ill suited for most family histories, since it focuses primarily on the descendants of a single Focus Person or Focus Couple. Since the excitement in most Family Histories is found in the many generations of ancestral branches and shared family relationships as one moves backwards in time, most descendant trees prove less interesting since the descendants of any Focus Person or Focus Couple will have little in common beyond that single shared person or couple. But all children and descendants of a Focus Person or Focus Couple not only share that person or couple's ancestry, but rapidly gain many new family relations due to the compounding nature of families. For instance, a Focus Person has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. By generation 10 there are over 1,000 shared gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-grandparents, some of whom may have exciting stories associated with them.
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| In general, the shape of any family tree will depend on whether the Focus Person or Focus Couple is from a recent generation (which means there should be a great many branches but few descendant generations), or from many generations back (when many there should be many descendants as well).
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| A Focus Person family history shows the ancestry of only one person while a Focus Couple family history shows the ancestry of two life partners, with each form having both merits and weaknesses. A Focus Couple history is the easiest to share with a couple's children, grandchildren and later descendants. But a Focus Couple History is a bit awkward when it is shared with in-laws and cousins, since they may not be related to a great many people in the history. A Focus Person history is thus better suited for sharing with 'same generation' siblings and relatives, since it does not show much of the ancestry of the unrelated spouse or partner. To compensate for this, the spouse or partner would then need their own Focus Person history to capture their separate past for sharing with their own side of the family. As for a couple's children, either type of history can work, although a Focus Couple history may initially seem more relevant and easier to understand.
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| A unique and powerful feature of the Focus Person histories presented on AncestryRegister.com's website, is that they include hyperlinks so it is possible to navigate between the history of one Focus Person parent, and the history of the other. Structured in this way, Focus Person histories appear to represent the 'best of both worlds' - separate family line genealogies easily shared with one or the other side of the family, but which a couple's children can still follow because of hyperlinks to the other parent's history. It does, however, require creating 2 histories (one for each parent) rather than a single one encompassing both.
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| Focus Persons or Focus Couples are oftentimes the parents or grandparents of a person or family now living. To protect the privacy of living persons, all authors should secure the consent of any living person before having their name appear in the history. It is also requested that information about living persons be removed or disguised, such as showing them only with a common identity such as 'Living' or 'Private'.
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| The information contained in AncestryRegister.com's family histories are initially created in a standard ancestry software program like 'Legacy' or 'Family Tree Works'. That information must then be reorganized to create separate 'family line' descents for the most important family lines present. To add historical color, Wikipedia links, other website links, and short biographies for the submitter's closest family or most notable ancestors should also be added where possible. Each person associated with a major historical or other event (i.e. an immigrant ancestor, participant in the Civil War or other major war, signer of the Magna Carta, etc.) can also be designated to receive an icon to indicate that association. All such items are separately added to the history using a questionaire prepared at the time the 'AR' website history is created. For more information about how to add a Family History to AR's website, click HERE.
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