Selzisims

NEWS from June 5:

The newest version “Ahnenblatt 2.51″ supports multiple languages - download the software and the language you want from here! Thank you, Nachfahre, for giving me that information!

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If you’ve ever played a family for several generations you might have tried to create a family tree for your sims. There are several ways to do this (as with Photo Shop or other graphics software), but one of the easiest and fastest ways is to use some specialized genealogy software. The freeware tool “Ahnenblatt” is just one of them, but it’s easily my favorite. Since it’s only available in German I was asked to write a short English tutorial for it, so here it is!

Download and installation

Download the tool here: http://www.ahnenblatt.de/ After clicking on “Download hier” you can choose which version you want. The standard installation file is “absetup.exe”, so you might want to choose that one. Download the file, run the setup and install the tool to your computer.

Create a new person

Start the tool and click on “Neu”. This will prompt a dialogue where you can enter the details of your legacy founder or any other person of your family.

Enter the details of that person and click on the green button on the bottom right when you’re done.

Translations:

Geburtsname = last name
Vornamen = first name(s)
geboren am = day of birth
Beruf = career
Geschlecht = gender (possible choices: männlich = male; weiblich = female; unbekannt = unknown)
gestorben am = day of death

Add other persons to the family

Once you’ve created a new person you can add their parents, spouses and kids, or you can save a picture of that person. Click on the pencil above the person’s name, and you’ll be able to edit the details of that person.

The window that will now open will look just like the one where you entered your first person’s details. Now take a look at the tabs in the lower half:

Translations:

Eltern = parents
Geschwister = siblings
Ehen = marriages
Kinder = children
Bilder = pictures

(The other tabs will most probably be uninteresting for you!)

Click on either tab to add the desired persons to your family. Let’s just start by adding a spouse to your person.

Click on “Ehen” and look at the four new lines that appeared. Each one is designated for a spouse of your sim. Enter the date and location of the wedding (or leave it blank) and then click on “mit” to add the spouse’s details.

The next pop-up will ask you if you want to add a new partner - yes, we would like to do that, so hit “Ja”.

Once you’ve entered all the details of the spouse hit the green OK button, and your family view should look like this:

Now let’s give our couple some kids. Hit the pencil once again and then choose “Kinder” in order to add the children. “Ahnenblatt” will provide enough space to enter up to 12 kids for that particular person. That should be enough for most families, I hope …

Click on the first empty number, confirm the pop-up message with “Ja” and enter the name and other details of your couple’s first kid. Hit the OK button when you’re done - now you should see something like this:

Add pictures to your persons

To add a picture to an entry first choose that person by clicking on their name; then hit the pencil and choose the tab “Bilder/Dateien”. Click on “Hinzufügen” and choose the picture of the current sim. After hitting the green confirmation button you will see the picture of that person in the top left corner.

You can add several pictures for each person and change their order with the little arrow buttons that appear once you’ve added another picture. You might use this feature to add a picture of every life stage of your sims, for example.

Generate the family tree

Once you’ve entered all the persons of your family you might want to export them into a nice family tree. Click on “Tafel” in the top menu, and the following window will appear:

There are four tabs on the top - the one we need is “Stammtafel”, so make sure to choose that one.

Now you can personalize your family tree in the following ways:

“Breite der Personenrahmen (in mm)” - Choose the width of each family member’s box in the family tree. Just leave it like that if you’re not sure what to enter.

“Position Ausgangsposition” - Choose if your founder should be on top or at the bottom of the tree.
“oben” = founder on top, “unten” = founder at the bottom

“Stil” - Specify how many informations and people are supposed to be displayed.
“klassisch” = Shows your founder and all of their blood-related offspring of the next three generations. Spouses are ignored.
“einfache Nachfahren” = Shows your founder and all of their blood-related offspring with no generations limit. Spouses are ignored.
“Nachfahren mit Ehepartner” = Shows your founder, their spouse and all of their offspring with their respective spouses. There’s no generations limit either.

Specify in “Datenauswahl” what info should be written underneath each picture in the family tree. Translations of the options can be seen earlier in this tutorial under “Create a new person”. If you want to include pictures in your tree please activate the checkbox “mit Bild”.
Change the shape and colors of the boxes by choosing your favorite style in “Personenrahmen”.

When you’re done setting your preferences hit “OK” and choose your founder in the list. Choose “OK” once more, and you’re done! Your family tree should look something like this:

Now let’s save that family tree as an image file. Choose “Speichern” in the top menu and choose a format (for example “JPEG”). Specify the size of the image and hit “OK”. Choose a file name and location where to save the file.

The next pop-up window will ask you to open the file right away - choose “Ja” or “Nein”, whatever you want. The first time you’re following this tutorial you should say “Ja”, though, so you can admire your beautiful family tree you just created … *LOL*