Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

If you really want to stress-test an arbitrary family tree documenter, try putting the X-Men in it.

http://img13.deviantart.net/4a05/i/2011/253/c/b/x_men_family... (and that's just the tip of the iceberg!)

Real family tress don't have to worry about time travel or cloning, of course, but that crazy stuff does actually serve as a reasonably good proxy of some of the strangest family trees out there (medieval European nobility, extended families with multiple divorces and remarryings, etc).

Cute graphics ! Some feedbacks :

- Please make sure forms can be validated with enter, an not just by clicking a button (use for onSubmit)

- allways auto-focus most important input of form (like a person's name) when opening it (at least when it's empty)

-after adding a person, open the form immediately

- when tree is empty, put the + button in the center of the screen, big, and with explaination. THen, make a transition to put it back to it's normal place. This way it makes it obvious and then falls back to standard material design location. Other option is to make an empty state image with a big, obvious arrow to the button.

- maybe add transitions that help user follow the change of state when adding someone to the tree.

Great work overall, i wish you the best for your project.

The GEDCOM file format is basically nested documents, and uses graph like pointers for linking things, so it is not that bad.

The actual data model is terrible though, as it was created by the church based on their 'traditional' style families.

However, most programs do not use GEDCOM to store their data (they might use an SQL database for example), but merely as a way to transfer data between programs.

Also note that there is always someone working to make a replacement for GEDCOM. Some of the latest efforts are GEDCOM-X (made by the church again), and the work by [FHISO](http://fhiso.org/). A lot of such projects, eg BetterGEDCOM, get bogged down in 'internal' politics, and rarely get anywhere.

I'll admit that I spent a little too much time on this trying to create the most interconnected tree I could imagine, just to see how many "my descendent is also my ancestor" connections are possible. The flexibility of this is pretty impressive.

Oh it's a nasty format, to be sure, and more useful for "cold storage" than something you'd actively work in. But for a long-term storage requirement? It's reasonably human readable and imminently portable as the go-to standard.

You can import a GEDCOM into any family tree software and be up and running in minutes. A tarball'd directory structure would be more of a nightmare.

On Ancestry.com, the UI is fine, and still better than anything else I've seen. If you have any other ideas, I'd love to hear them. My issue with Ancestry is primarily their model that actively hinders collaboration between researchers unless you've paid their toll. They're taking your research and charging others for the privilege of seeing it. Given the open and helpful nature of genealogical researchers (see also: "search angels"), this rubs me the wrong way.

(So I use Ancestry for research and tree management—and I pay them $200/yr for access to their data sources—then I export (what else?) a GEDCOM, route it through a couple scripts of my own making, and publish it on my personal site.)