It’s time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver. This week’s challenge has us digging into our genealogy software program, but it’s an easy task:

1)  Have you made a pedigree fan chart recently?  Show us yours!  How did you do it?  Which program did you use?

Did I mention that this is an easy task? Well, it’s easy if your software program has the ability to create a fan chart. I’m still using RootsMagic 7 and didn’t find any option to create a fan chart.

However, I do have RootsMagic 9 installed on my computer so I just needed to complete one extra step – create a gedcom from RM7 and import it into RM9. That took all of about one minute.

My fan chart covers 9 generations and the colors divide the lines of my paternal grandfather and grandmother and those of my maternal grandfather and grandmother.

The paternal side of the fan chart is much emptier than my maternal lines because all of my paternal ancestors are Rusyns who lived in today’s Slovakia where the church books only go back to the early 1800s.

On the other hand, my maternal lines have a number of ancestors identified back to the 9th generation and I’d say my maternal grandparents ancestral lines are quite equally distributed in terms of the number of ancestors who have been identified.

Thank you, Randy, for this week’s challenge. I learned how do do something new in RootsMagic!