Weekend is approaching quickly, so it's time for some Friday nonsense. Some weeks ago, I was looking for an easy to use tool to create a family tree. Most tools I found online are way too complex, probably targeting professional family tree creators ;-) I ended up using ARIS Express to document my genealogy. Attached to this post, you can see my results. Ok, I have to confess I'm not part of the British royal family tree, but I thought this might be a more interesting family tree to showcase than my personal one...
Some ARIS Express features come in handy while creating a family tree. I used the general diagram. Each box represents a family member. I layouted the box so that name, time of birth and death, official title, link to the Wikipedia profile, and picture have a fixed position. After finalising the layout of the box, I created a fragment so that I could easily reuse the box. Besides, I also customized the appearance of the connections used to document marriage between members of the family tree. Even though ARIS Express provides only a single connection type in general diagrams, it is now possible to distinguish between marriage and parental relationships. I only added a dummy profile picture to each member of the family tree, because I'm not sure where I can get photos of the British royals without needing to pay for it. But this shouldn't be a problem if you build your personal family tree.
My family tree of the British royals must be read from top to down. A second wife is located below the first one to document the order of the marriages. For example, Lady Camilla is located below Lady Diana, because she is the second wife of Prince Charles. I only documented the family tree of those persons, who have a direct line to Queen Elizabeth II. So Lady Diana is included, because she was married to Prince Charles, but I have not included the parents of Lady Diana.
If you are an expert of royal family trees, please jump in and help! For example, I'm not sure if the spouses of Princess Anne also got some kind of royal title. When is someone getting a royal title? Is it enough to be married to a member of the royal family?
What can we learn from this little exercise? Well, by looking very carefully at the family tree of the British royals, we will notice that there are still some opportunities for all of us to become part of this family tree. Princes Henry and William, but also princess Beatrice and Eugenie are not married yet :-)
