Genealogy

One of my many hobbies is genealogy. Over the years, I've sampled many of the various software tools for tracking genealogical information, and while each has their good features, none of them really provide everything you need. I've been part of various mailing groups that have discussed better ways of storing such data, have seen some interesting attempts, but still feel that there's room for improvement.

Perhaps Wave is suitable?

Genealogy is inherently hierarchical - people have children. Replies fill this role nicely. The other relationships, marriage and siblings, are another matter. Wave blips can be at the same "level", so we can perhaps use that to represent a marriage. But if we have a number of children under a parent (most likely their mother, for biological reasons), then they, too, will be at the same "level", so will look like they're spouses, not siblings. And adding those siblings' spouses just complicates the issue even more.

So perhaps individuals can't be represented as blips, but instead relationships should be. The Wave would contain a blip for each marriage, and a blip for each parent-child relationship. Sibling relationships would be assumed/deduced. The question then is how are the individuals represented? As replies to top-level blips? Perhaps, but individuals can appear in more than one relationship -- their own child-parent relationship, as well as their marriage(s). Does Wave support links between blips? I don't know quite yet. Do we link to a completely different Wave? That gets unwieldy if every individual is its own Wave.

Okay, so we haven't figured out this quite yet. Do we abandon the idea? Not quite yet. It was, in fact, the other bits of genealogical research that first came to mind when I started playing with Wave.

Citations are a big part of responsible genealogy. It's one thing to record the relationships that you discover through your research, but recording your sources is very important, not only for yourself, to verify data and reaffirm old research; but also for others to whom you provide research results -- they should be able to trust your information, and being able to look up your sources goes a long way to that. Source notes can simply be replies to the data itself, whether it's a claim about a relationship, the date of it, or any information recorded about an individual.

Along those lines, conflicting data can also be recorded via a reply, such as birthdates that disagree, or even birthdates that agree from differing sources, helping to provide extra proof or confirmation of one possibility over another. This is more of a research tool than a research result; it allows you to keep track of every possibility mentioned, to help you match up with other discoveries.

Suppositions, too, can be recorded as blips, with the reasoning behind them attached as one or more replies. This is much more preferable to adding a relationship or data that was based on supposition into data without marking it as such, which I've found in my research; you find some data with which you want to leap to a conclusion, and then find someone else's research that also reached that conclusion: that's a false confirmation of your own conclusion, and thus you feel justified in making the conclusion. And if you yourself don't mark it as just a supposition, but instead just add this "fact" to your own data, you, too, are going to further this false confirmation if your genealogical data goes public. Most genealogical software doesn't support marking facts as supposition, and thus Wave can contribute to genealogical research in this manner.

And finally, to-do lists and general research notes are another good candidate for replies, letting the researcher make a note of future research directions based on an individual or relationship, or overall notes about websites to reference, contacts made, and overall notes about your research path.


I'll be investigating whether Wave can be utilized for the genealogist's new tool, but as I do, I'll be thinking of that aspect of Wave that I didn't even touch on -- the collaborative nature of Wave, which would allow multiple researchers to contribute to one single body of genealogical data.