Open Source Genealogy

I have been search­ing for ways to improve my gene­a­lo­gical research. I set two spe­cific cri­teria for my search:

• A cross-platform browser/editor that uses GEDCOM files natively;
• A means to share gene­a­lo­gical data in a free and open manner

Two open source products have emerged that work together to meet my needs: PHP­GED­Viewer (PGV) and Gen­esis (an open source PGV research tool) part of the Dis­trib­uted Fam­ily Tree Pro­ject.
The mar­ket for gene­a­lo­gical soft­ware has has been a growth indus­tries over the past couple dec­ades. There is a nat­ural fit between digital tools and gene­a­logy. Digital access to census records has caused an explo­sion in the num­bers of people seek­ing to dis­cover their roots and in their abil­ity to do so eas­ily and effi­ciently. When you are deal­ing with grow­ing data­sets, digital tools make sense.
One of the under­ly­ing gene­a­lo­gical tru­isms is that we are all con­nec­ted through our fam­ily trees and this leads to a second real­iz­a­tion. At some point, our research will join with another’s and another’s as we con­duct research. Thus there is a nat­ural reason why gene­a­lo­gical data should be shared.
Recently there have been calls to adopt an open source model for the data itself. The GEDCOM model, ori­gin­ally con­struc­ted and pro­moted by the Church of the Lat­ter Day Saints was the star­ing point for such dis­cus­sion and it has gown from there.
Since the 1990’s I have relied on Reunion from Leister Soft­ware. Its has become an OSX only solu­tion that is won­der­fully craf­ted and a joy to use. I have been search­ing for a more effi­cient means to store, access and manip­u­late my gene­a­lo­gical data on mul­tiple plat­forms seam­lessly. GEDCOM files obvi­ously meet this need but few of the pro­pri­et­ary pro­grammes work nat­ively with the GEDCOM format. As a note, JGed, an open source java product does uses GEDCOM files nat­ively and its shows prom­ise, but was not there yet for me. Most pro­grammes can import and export the vari­ous fla­vours of GEDCOM, so with the demise of Leister’s Win­dows product, this meant con­stantly syncing GEDCOM files back and forth and keep­ing fin­gers crossed that modi­fic­a­tions and updates did not lead to data loss.
Web-enabled makes obvi­ous sense for meet­ing the cross plat­form avail­ab­il­ity. How­ever, until recently GEDCOM files on the web were for shar­ing and not for edit­ing. Most com­mer­cial pro­grammes has a routine to cre­ate a series of web pages to present your gene­a­lo­gical inform­a­tion, but these pages were static. There are also a num­ber of free or share­ware pro­grams that would take a GEDCOM file and cre­ate pages. I was par­tic­u­larly fond of Squir­rel, a Macin­tosh port of GED2HTML that, in my mind at least, did a much finer job than its inspir­a­tion. How­ever, it hit a wall with the move to OSX. Non­ethe­less, the pro­cess was still one-sided and static…the web pages were pretty, but didn’t treat allow for the modi­fic­a­tion of the under­ly­ing data.
I blogged a couple of times recently about a new web ser­vice called Geni. Its visu­ally stun­ning and very AJAXy. I believe that it is a great set to per­mit fam­ily mem­bers with vary­ing degrees of web savvy to cooper­at­ively add to fam­ily tree data. Its easy to use and free. Cur­rent draw­backs are its inab­il­ity to allow users to upload exist­ing data files (you have to enter people one at a time), but they have added a down­load option and seem to be mov­ing quickly to add addi­tional fea­tures.
But what about hav­ing a solid, friendly GEDCOM-based means to allow for dis­sem­in­a­tion, edit­ing and stor­age of your gene­a­lo­gical inform­a­tion? I have recently installed PHP­GED­Viewer for my family’s use and my ini­tial exper­i­ence is very pos­it­ive.
As the name sug­gests, PGV is a PHP-based frame­work that works with stand­ard GEDCOM files and offers full user man­age­ment (to allow for com­plete col­lab­or­a­tion). It is sur­pris­ingly flex­ible allow­ing you to use a SQL data­base as a back end if you have lar­ger files and/or access, or to use a indexed text file base if you lack access to a data­base. The inter­face is rich and rel­at­ively intu­it­ive. Most import­antly, its open source! I am very excited about the prom­ise of this product. My GEDCOM file is pub­licly avail­able through this pro­ject and registered at PGV. This ful­fills half of my second cri­teria.
I con­cur­rently dis­covered Hilton Camp­bell’s Gen­esis which is part of his Dis­trib­uted Fam­ily Tree Pro­ject. Gen­esis allows you to search across pub­licly ref­er­enced PGV data files.
PGV has been around for a while, and I am late comer to it. Inter­est­ing tid­bit: “On June 26, 2006, the php­Ged­View site announced that php­Ged­View was the most act­ive pro­ject at Source­forge.” Gen­esis is only a recent addi­tion to the game. Together these excit­ing ini­ti­at­ives start to build towards the prom­ise the a great inter­linked open source gene­a­lo­gical web. Geni offers another excit­ing altern­at­ive. Will com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers embrace the prom­ise of open source? There are huge volumes of gene­a­lo­gical data being shared today through a vari­ety of com­mer­cial co-operative online ven­tures. Can this inform­a­tion be lib­er­ated?