ANCESTRY OF THE DANISH RANTZAU FAMILY
The Rantzau's belong to the "old" noble families. Before I start telling stories about them, I would like to present some of my difficulties in "illustrating" the relations of the present Danish count to his (and my daughter's) more famous forefathers.
As an engineer, I like diagrams, because they can contain a lot of information in a restricted place, and show the relations visually, so I constructed a diagram, showing these, in Excel, which certainly never was designed for this purpose.
I used a 4-cell rectangle per individual and with numbers/text and color I could put in 8 types of data for every person!
These forefathers include eg Gorm the Old and Charlemange.
If you happen to have Excel it can be read very easily, and it only occupies two A4 pages.
However, not everybody has this program and I was looking for a way to present its data in some way, better adapted to the WWW. Though it is possible to save an Excel file in HTML, I found out that this produces a large file (about 700 kB) which does not look very pretty.
I found a (partial) solution for my problem in a program called "Oedipus II". This can read a gedcom file and change the data into web pages showing 4 generations.
As these noble families have a high rate of inter-marriage, for every living member of the Rantzau clan some part of this ancestry shows up. In "my" Rantzau family it gave me 10000 pages, at about 34 Mb! Doing the same for the "royal" lines gave another 350 pages. This for a total of around 6000 individuals in these gedcom files
From these pages I selected those including the individuals present in the diagram, weeded out links to other pages and connected the Rantzau and the Royal branches. That left me with 50 pages, at 120 kB. This increases the load-up speed about 300 times!
(Later I had the Excel file transformed to Adobe files. This, however, creates another problem because these Adobe files do seem not to accept hyperlinks, so you can not return by hyperlink to the previous page. When leaving the Adobe pages, you might try the tool bar button:"previous page", to get back to the home page documents, otherwise you might have to start anew.)
That's why I provide two links here:
* In Oedipus to those selected ancestors through the youngest Danish Rantzau who provides further links.You can't go wrong.
Returning to the first page will give you a link back to this page. I am not sure if it runs on a computer without the Oedipus program.
* To that Adobe file, by way of a .htm file explaining about it. Ancestors.
Via, "Genopro", which changes a gedcom file (of this size) to a chaotic diagram. and With a lot of work, I could reconstruct this into a readable diagram giving all ancestors of that youngest Danish Rantzau.
So I left those Oedipus files in and gave an extra link to the Adobe and Genopro files via the Ancestor file above.
My thanks to Mr Leen Lamain, who provided the Oedipus II program as free ware.