April 25, 2001

11:29 AM

Gendex: A Family History DatabaseFor some time, I have been casually researching ways to store and query complex kin relations. I may have found just the model I want, developed by none other than the CJC-LDS (Mormons!) Specifically by the family history department.
The FAMily record is used to record ... family unions caused by two people becoming the parents of a child. There can be no more than one HUSB/father and one WIFE/mother listed in each FAM_RECORD. If, for example, a man participated in more than one family union, then he would appear in more than one FAM_RECORD.
And thank God they thought of a bigamy data model! Now, will it export XML?
posted by rschram (6 comments total)

rSchram... here are a couple of additional links that seem germane to the thread: the LDS Church's official site, and their genealogy mega resource (NB: If you want to look up one of your ancestors, you'll have better luck if they're deceased, as the site has filtered out most living persons for privacy reasons).

Also, rSchram, you may want to look up the algorithm used for searching for surnames across geographic and temporal variations (Smythe, Smithe, Smith). I just wish I could remember what it was called.
posted by silusGROK at 11:49 AM on April 25, 2001

SOUNDEX.
posted by kindall at 12:39 PM on April 25, 2001

Thanks, Kindall. You're da man.
posted by silusGROK at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2001

10 PRINT "I LOVED BASIC"
20 GOTO 10
END
posted by jpoulos at 1:29 PM on April 25, 2001

Note that GENDEX isn't actually the model; GEDCOM is. GENDEX uses GEDCOMs to build its index, but I don't think they had any part in defining the format.

As for the XML question, there are moves afoot in the genealogy community to move to an XML-based format for data interchange. There's a recognition that GEDCOM is kind of flaky in a lot of ways, and not as robust as one would desire. There's a page on a proposal for GED XML that I first read a year or two ago, but I don't know if there's been any movement on it. I've heard of a couple of other efforts that may have more momentum, but I don't remember where I saw them.
posted by geneablogy at 9:30 PM on April 26, 2001