Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

#51

Post by basseq » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 9:22 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #30

basseq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be the "easiest", but it's not the most portable, and would be a nightmare to navigate. I'd recommend he work in a software package that can export to GEDCOM. That's a structured data format used by genealogists to track relationships and metadata. The current version is 21 years old, and the original spec was designed in 1984. It's robust and industry-standard. Every single genealogical product worth its…

Is it robust? I help my mom with genealogy stuff from time to time and the gedcom file we got from some cousins was, let us say, a mess. I agree it is widely supported. One thing to watch out for with export is whether you are working with data that doesn't make it into the gedcom file.

As a file format, sure, it's robust. Garbage-in-garbage-out, though. A directory structure would be just as messy, and harder to use.

And great point on export. Assets like pictures are an example: you'd still need to store them somewhere. (IIRC, GEDCOM format points to a file path of some sort.)

Edit: actually, you can embed multimedia (as a BLOB of some sort) directly into a GEDCOM, but I'd leave the files separate to maintain human readability.

Re: Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

#52

Post by basseq » Fri, Jul 28, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #40

basseq wrote: post #12

I love family trees: they're interesting, complex, data-driven, and beautiful. There are some very challenging decisions you need to make to make a tree readable, like whose ancestors to show, whose children, and how far back. To give you a sense, I have ~3,500 people in my family tree. I want different trees to show, say: a) all descendants of a root ancestor, or b) all of my ancestors. This is reasonably easy to us…

3500?! and I don't even know who my grandfather was...

I go both up (I know all but 2 of my 16 g-g-grandparents, and 22 of my 32 g-g-g-grandparents) and down (I'm tracking 14+ generations of everyone descended from my 10th great-grandfather).

I'm the kind of person that likes 100% completion in my video games, so the idea of "filling in" all the gaps is satisfying to me. The amount of public records on BMD (birth, marriage, and death—the "holy trinity" of genealogical data points) is staggering in most countries. From census and SSA records in the U.S. to parish records in Scotland, you can find a lot of information.

Re: Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

#53

Post by basseq » Fri, Jul 28, 2017, 1:19 PM UTC

yosyp wrote: post #38

basseq wrote: post #12

I love family trees: they're interesting, complex, data-driven, and beautiful. There are some very challenging decisions you need to make to make a tree readable, like whose ancestors to show, whose children, and how far back. To give you a sense, I have ~3,500 people in my family tree. I want different trees to show, say: a) all descendants of a root ancestor, or b) all of my ancestors. This is reasonably easy to us…

This is very interesting insight! May I ask which software or service you use to keep track of your family tree?

Ancestry.com has the best UI and is the "easiest" to use that I've found. You can use it for free to just build your tree, but you'll feel like a second-class citizen. Their data sources are very good and easy to use, but you pay out the nose for them. (Obligatory note that I very much disagree with how Ancestry.com has set themselves up to collect money off the backs of researchers who often work for free, and will put your inputs behind their paywall.)

So Ancestry.com is a good place for research and for family tree management. I've set up the second half of my stack to generate HTML files, which I keep (publicly) on my personal site.