Are you a family tree climber?
Apr 2, 2022 3:52:16 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on Apr 2, 2022 3:52:16 GMT -8
Are You A Family Tree Climber?
Click the link at the top to read the whole article. Here's another interesting quote that's packed with implications for anyone wanting to raise the bar for genealogy software:
Here's a section from Wikipedia's article on GEDCOM:
A quick peek at the GEDCOM problem informs me that it's based on the husband-wife-family model, in other words, modern western norms, or to be more explicit, it appears that today's genieware and its sharing-base GEDCOM were created in the dark ages of computers with 500 Mb hard drives, and created by WASPs for WASPs. (Don't know what WASP stands for? Look it up.) But that's not the worst part. The worst part is, as stated in the quote from Mr. Mumford above, that GEDCOM was created for the purpose of sharing information stored in simplistic genealogical databases.
How does this effect my plans for Treebard? I can't see ever justifying the effort of force-fitting reality into the GEDCOM mold. It's highly likely that Treebard will always return to its earliest inspiration. Treebard should literally replace GEDCOM as the sharing standard. "Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole program."
Now how's that for simplistic and unrealistic?
This article was previously published in the Alberta Family Histories Society's quarterly, “The Chinook” Volume 24 Issue 2, Spring, April 2004
In an article in the NGS Quarterly, “Genealogy in the Information Age”, (Volume 91, number 4, December 2003) Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FNGS, FASG, author of “Evidence”, outlines the history of genealogical research and the struggle to have it recognized as a scholarly discipline. One of the contributing factors to the low regard in which genealogists are held is the quality of the research that has appeared in the past and is still appearing today.
In the article, Mills divides today’s genealogical researchers into three groups, the Traditionalist, the Generational Historian, and the Family Tree Climber.
The Traditionalists have a sound knowledge of sources, carefully document and analyze their evidence, but produce a genealogy that rarely reflects anything concerning the way the families actually lived.
The Generational Historian follow similar procedures to the Traditionalist but once having established the identities and relationships they seek out further information on the economic, religious, legal, social, and cultural conditions that existed in the various localities that can cast some light on how family members lived. With this information they can then portray, with some accuracy, the lives of those individuals.
The third, and by far the largest, group of researchers are the Family Tree Climbers. Enthusiastic, but unencumbered by any knowledge of how to do genealogical research, they accept information from any source without question. They assume since it has been published, in book form or on the web, it must be true.
In an article in the NGS Quarterly, “Genealogy in the Information Age”, (Volume 91, number 4, December 2003) Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FNGS, FASG, author of “Evidence”, outlines the history of genealogical research and the struggle to have it recognized as a scholarly discipline. One of the contributing factors to the low regard in which genealogists are held is the quality of the research that has appeared in the past and is still appearing today.
In the article, Mills divides today’s genealogical researchers into three groups, the Traditionalist, the Generational Historian, and the Family Tree Climber.
The Traditionalists have a sound knowledge of sources, carefully document and analyze their evidence, but produce a genealogy that rarely reflects anything concerning the way the families actually lived.
The Generational Historian follow similar procedures to the Traditionalist but once having established the identities and relationships they seek out further information on the economic, religious, legal, social, and cultural conditions that existed in the various localities that can cast some light on how family members lived. With this information they can then portray, with some accuracy, the lives of those individuals.
The third, and by far the largest, group of researchers are the Family Tree Climbers. Enthusiastic, but unencumbered by any knowledge of how to do genealogical research, they accept information from any source without question. They assume since it has been published, in book form or on the web, it must be true.
Click the link at the top to read the whole article. Here's another interesting quote that's packed with implications for anyone wanting to raise the bar for genealogy software:
Early genealogical software, developed in the mid 1980s, were largely simplistic programs recording only birth, death, and marriage dates and locations as well as a few notes. There were no provisions for sources or argumentation. A few more powerful programs were available but they required powerful, and therefore more expensive, computers. As a result, the simplistic programs, being less expensive and using the less powerful computers, proliferated. When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints developed the GEDCOM data transfer specification it was based on the simplistic type of program. As the capabilities of these programs increased GEDCOM was upgraded as well. In 1995, the current version, 5.5, was released. It provides minimal support for source documentation but otherwise is capable of supporting today’s conclusional programs, most of which have adopted the minimal GEDCOM specifications as their standard for source documentation support. Unfortunately, GEDCOM has never been able to accommodate the more advanced programs. While the developers of these programs have implemented GEDCOM, much of the information they record cannot be transferred.
Here's a section from Wikipedia's article on GEDCOM:
Support for multi-person events and sources
A GEDCOM file can contain information on events such as births, deaths, census records, ship's records, marriages, etc.; a rule of thumb is that an event is something that took place at a specific time, at a specific place (even if time and place are not known). GEDCOM files can also contain attributes such as physical description, occupation, and total number of children; unlike events, attributes generally cannot be associated with a specific time or place.
The GEDCOM specification requires that each event or attribute is associated with exactly one individual or family.[55] This causes redundancy for events such as census records where the actual census entry often contains information on multiple individuals. In the GEDCOM file, for census records a separate census "CENS" event must be added for each individual referenced. Some genealogy programs, such as Gramps and The Master Genealogist, have elaborate database structures for sources that are used, among other things, to represent multi-person events. When databases are exported from one of these programs to GEDCOM, these database structures cannot be represented in GEDCOM due to this limitation, with the result that the event or source information including all of the relevant citation reference information must be duplicated each place that it is used. This duplication makes it difficult for the user to maintain the information related to sources.
In the GEDCOM specification, events that are associated with a family such as marriage information is only stored in a GEDCOM once, as part of the family (FAM) record, and then both spouses are linked to that single family record.
Ambiguity in the specification
The GEDCOM specification was made purposefully flexible to support many ways of encoding data, particularly in the area of sources. This flexibility has led to a great deal of ambiguity, and has produced the side effect that some genealogy programs which import GEDCOM do not import all of the data from a file.
A GEDCOM file can contain information on events such as births, deaths, census records, ship's records, marriages, etc.; a rule of thumb is that an event is something that took place at a specific time, at a specific place (even if time and place are not known). GEDCOM files can also contain attributes such as physical description, occupation, and total number of children; unlike events, attributes generally cannot be associated with a specific time or place.
The GEDCOM specification requires that each event or attribute is associated with exactly one individual or family.[55] This causes redundancy for events such as census records where the actual census entry often contains information on multiple individuals. In the GEDCOM file, for census records a separate census "CENS" event must be added for each individual referenced. Some genealogy programs, such as Gramps and The Master Genealogist, have elaborate database structures for sources that are used, among other things, to represent multi-person events. When databases are exported from one of these programs to GEDCOM, these database structures cannot be represented in GEDCOM due to this limitation, with the result that the event or source information including all of the relevant citation reference information must be duplicated each place that it is used. This duplication makes it difficult for the user to maintain the information related to sources.
In the GEDCOM specification, events that are associated with a family such as marriage information is only stored in a GEDCOM once, as part of the family (FAM) record, and then both spouses are linked to that single family record.
Ambiguity in the specification
The GEDCOM specification was made purposefully flexible to support many ways of encoding data, particularly in the area of sources. This flexibility has led to a great deal of ambiguity, and has produced the side effect that some genealogy programs which import GEDCOM do not import all of the data from a file.
A quick peek at the GEDCOM problem informs me that it's based on the husband-wife-family model, in other words, modern western norms, or to be more explicit, it appears that today's genieware and its sharing-base GEDCOM were created in the dark ages of computers with 500 Mb hard drives, and created by WASPs for WASPs. (Don't know what WASP stands for? Look it up.) But that's not the worst part. The worst part is, as stated in the quote from Mr. Mumford above, that GEDCOM was created for the purpose of sharing information stored in simplistic genealogical databases.
How does this effect my plans for Treebard? I can't see ever justifying the effort of force-fitting reality into the GEDCOM mold. It's highly likely that Treebard will always return to its earliest inspiration. Treebard should literally replace GEDCOM as the sharing standard. "Forget GEDCOM, just share the whole program."
Now how's that for simplistic and unrealistic?