In praise of the family fan chart

Ancestry has added a fan chart as a way to view your pedigree and navigate to direct-line ancestors in your tree. It’s in Beta now and when I checked it out, I really liked what I saw.

In my opinion, the fan chart is so much cleaner and less cluttered than the pedigree charts (horizontal or vertical) offered by Ancestry. (It doesn’t offer green leaves or Thrulines alerts however.) I can click on any ancestor in the chart and be taken to that ancestor’s Ancestry profile.

As an illustration, I’ll share my family chart on Ancestry, from me through my second great grandparents.

Here’s the fan chart:

And here’s the vertical pedigree chart, which had been my preference.

I love how fan charts provide an attractive and easy-to-understand progress of generations. The family-tree software I use on my Mac, Reunion, offers a fan chart too, but it’s not clickable like the Ancestry chart. Here’s what my Reunion fan chart looks like:

I’d be willing to bet that your family-tree software offers a fan chart. In my opinion, it’s worth looking for!

It just occurred to me to see whether Family Search has a fan-chart view and it does! I simply logged in and clicked Tree and there it was. Each ancestor is clickable and you can put a person in the middle of the fan chart by hovering over their section and clicking the fan icon. (I have not connected my husband on the Family Search family tree and rather than ignore that, it looks like Family Search included a blank grid for my husband and our non-existent children.)

Here’s what my Family Search fan chart looks like.

This is getting repetitive, so I’ll stop. I just wanted to take a moment to express my appreciation for fan charts!