Mary Thiele Fobian is planning a reunion for her Napp/Knapp family branch. Fobian asks how other families have displayed, printed, published their family trees and histories. Her concern is about having a HUGE family tree of eight to nine generations and hundreds of people. The location of her reunion will add to the challenge of mounting an exhibit because it will be outside in a park.
One solution to Fobian’s query came from Phil Bousley, Vincennes, Indiana. Bousley wrote, “At our last Bousley (Beausoleil) reunion in Dunbar, Wisconsin, the hosts put two 4′ x 8′ plywood sheets on a wall and each family from great grandfather down was listed in a descendancy chart. I added over 150 names from the chart to my genealogy program. Unfortunately, not all of the last names were given so I still have a lot of investigative work to do. At the next reunion I am going to take a notebook and have everyone list their address, phone number, e-mail address and how they are related to the oldest ancestor. I also plan to ask relatives to add some story about one or more of their ancestors. The reunion is a great source of interesting information — especially if the old relatives are there. Gee, I am one of the old relatives. Sometimes the older relatives have information that is not available in any book or record.”
Claire LeBeaux of genealogy.com advises that if you have a GEDCOM or FTW file (or are willing to create one), you can use Family Tree Maker to create a tree, then print it to file, save it to disk, then take the disk to a quick copy shop like Kinkos and print it on their plotter.
