Top-down, Left-to-right, what’s the difference?

Published on: 20 December 2011

The traditional way of displaying a Descendant tree is “Top-down”, from top to bottom. This is also called the “English Monarchy” style. Here is an example, my maternal grand-father’s gang:

Descendants – Top-down


Left-to-right

This format is well understood. However, it takes up more room. Our Charting Companion program offers another format, the Left-to-right. This format can be twice as compact as the Top-down, even when the same font size is used, and the same information is included.

At a family reunion, the Top-down format can be spread horizontally across a wall.

The Left-to-right format can be broken up into multiple panels: create a separate chart for each son and daughter of the patriarch or original ancestor, and display them side-by-side.

Left-to-right uses half the paper: more economical, faster to assemble when tiling multiple pages. Also cheaper at the print shop when you’re doing poster-size!