ANCESTRY OF THE DANISH RANTZAU FAMILY
I constructed a diagram, showing the most interesting forefathers of the present Danish count, in Excel. These include eg Gorm the Old and Charlemange. Key figure in this is Frantz Rantzau, Henrik's son, who married Anna Rosenkrantz. She has Regitze Løvenbalk, a daughter of Christoffer II, in her ancestry.
If you happen to have Excel it can be read very easily, and only uses 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.
It is possible to save an Excel file in HTML, but I found out that this produces a large file (about 700 kB) which does not look very pretty.
As an engineer, I like diagrams, because they can contain a lot of information in a restricted place, and show the relations visually. 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!
I found a (partial) solution for my problem in a program called "Oedipus II". This can read a gedcom file and change the data to web pages showing 4 generations. These noble families have a high rate of inter-marriage, so 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 I selected those including the individuals present in the diagram, weeded out links to other pages and connected the Rantzau and the Royal braches. That left me with 50 pages, at 120 kB. This increases the load-up speed about 400 times!
That's why I provide two links here:
1) To the selected ancestors through the youngest Danish Rantzau, who provides further links.
You can't go wrong. Returning to that page will give you a link back home.
2) To the diagram,by way of a .htm file explaining about it: Ancestors
My thanks to Mr Leen Lamain, who provided the Oedipus II program as freeware. Visit him. Oedipus II