Collaborating without having to be in sync

I've mentioned the Family History Information Standards Organization (FHISO) previously. It is one of two organizations, along with FamilySearch (with their Gedcom X effort), trying to define future data formats for genealogy. 

Back in March, FHISO announced an open Call for Papers in order to solicit ideas for future genealogy standards. This is the first step in the FHISO's efforts to create new standards.

Yesterday I submitted a paper, titled Asynchronous Collaboration: A Proposal, which outlines my ideas for facilitating collaboration between different researchers, while not forcing researchers to fully merge their databases. The key here is that people can accept family trees from other people, without having to merge their entire tree into their own, and with a query mechanism for figuring out conflicts, or requesting additional information like sources and media related to individual records.

This proposal submitted to FHISO and published on my other blog, Lexigenealogy, which is where I now publish my more technical genealogy writings, as well as other technical work related to lexicography.

Keep in mind that this is a fairly technical proposal. It's not really light reading. If you're interested in the technical aspects of genealogy, and in furthering the creation of new technical standards, I think you'll find it interesting.

If you're interested, hop over to Lexigenealogy and take a look.

RootsMagic joins FHISO effort to improve genealogy standards

I've written before about efforts to improve genealogy standards (The Future of Sharing and Genealogy Standards, Another Look). It was in 1995 that the last real standard of GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication), version 5.5, was released. Most genealogy programs support a draft release which was released in 1999, even though it was never finalized, called GEDCOM 5.5.1. So it's been at least 13 years since any standard has been created that has been used for genealogy.

Earlier this year, the GEDCOM X effort was announced, but it is not yet used in any products. The other major effort, started earlier, but without the support of FamilySearch which originally created GEDCOM, is the Family History Information Standards Organization (FHSIO). Originally called BetterGEDCOM, it is an effort started by genealogists to create a new open standard for exchanging genealogy information.

In May, FHISO announced that Ancestry.com had joined as a founding member of the organization. Personally, I was hesitant to attribute as much as you might think to that announcement, as nothing in the announcement mentioned support in FamilyTreeMaker (their desktop genealogy application) nor Ancestry.com itself.

Yesterday, however, it was announced that RootsMagic had also joined FHISO as a founding member. As a major provider of genealogy software, it's great news that they've joined this effort to create new standards. Without support of genealogy software companies, none of these efforts will be worth much.

Hopefully we'll see other genealogy software companies like Millenia (Legacy Family Tree), Leister Productions (Reunion for Mac) and Incline (Ancestral Quest) will also support this effort, as well as open source efforts like GRAMPS.

UPDATE: On August 15, it was announced that WikiTree has also joined FHISO as a Founding Member. Good to see. I'm a fan of WikiTree, and its support of FHISO can only be a good thing.

Genealogy standards, another look

Over a year ago I took a look at genealogy data standards and where they were headed in my article The Future of Sharing (Genealogical Data). In some ways a lot has changed since I wrote the article, but in some ways we're really at the same point we were then, with no clear picture of the future. This past week's 2nd annual Rootstech conference (my last article mentioned the then-upcoming 1st Rootstech) has brought some of the questions asked into focus, so I thought it was worth reviewing what has happened.

GEDCOM X

On the face of it, the biggest news to come out of the conference was the release of long-awaited successor to GEDCOM, GEDCOM X. FamilySearch, the online presence of the LDS church which was the creator and maintainer of the original GEDCOM standard, released this new standard at the conference a few days ago. FamilySearch hits a lot of the right keywords in the release – the format can be XML or JSON based, is released under an Creative Commons license, supports metadata including Dublin Core and FOAF, the development is hosted on Github, it offers both a file format (like tradition GEDCOM) and an API, and more. Yet there are also some strange decisions that seem to have been made, and no explanation seems to be given. One that stands out is the decision to base the file format MIME, a format created for sending e-mail attachements (MIME is an acronym of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). So far the logic behind many of the decisions that have been made seem very opaque. The entire development of GEDCOM X seems to have been done up to this point without any input from the industry at large, or even the well know efforts to improve GEDCOM, such as the Better GEDCOM group. Indeed, the answer in their FAQ about these efforts seems largely patronizing:

Have you heard about FHISO (BetterGEDCOM), OpenGen, ?
Of course. We've heard about them and many others who are making efforts to standardize genealogical technologies. We applaud the work of everybody willing to contribute to the standardization effort, and we hope they will continue to contribute their voices.

In other words, at least to my ears, it's saying they know other people want to improve GEDCOM, but they are going to do their own thing and maybe they'll listen occassionally (but no promises). In short, while it's great that FamilySearch has come out with a new standard, their approach to doing so does not seem geared towards gaining widespread adoption from the industry at large, or at least not in such a friendly manner.

Of course, the huge advantage FamilySearch has over just about anyone else is the very large developer network they've cultivated for accessing familysearch.org. They are essentially a non-profit organization which has many commercial companies using their current API. To the extent that they transition these existing companies from their legacy API to GEDCOM X, they will certainly have a major advantage over other efforts to replace GEDCOM.

Progress On Other Fronts

So what happened to the other efforts mentioned in my last article?

The most visible effort has been the BetterGEDCOM wiki, which is moving from an informal group to a formal organization called the Family History Information Standards Organisation (FHISO) which will now sponsor the wiki. While they have been the most active effort to create a replacement for GEDCOM, they seem to have been overtaken by the too-many-cooks problem and how they plan on coming to a consensus remains to be seen, let alone how they convince industry organizations and companies to agree with them. It will be interesting to see FHISO's response to GEDCOM X, and if they will focus their efforts on trying to implement their ideas within the GEDCOM X framework, or if they will continue to try to go it alone.

The OpenGen International Alliance, started by the people at AppleTree.com, doesn't seem to have taken off. Either for the matter has AppleTree, which may explain the why the OpenGen site hasn't been updated in the past year (and refers to an upcoming webinar last March).

APIs

One of the most interesting developments last year was the introduction of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for genealogy web sites. Indeed, the rumors around what would become GEDCOM X was that it was only an API, and not a file format, but luckily that turned out not to be true and it is both. The only APIs that had been released before my last article were Geni.com's API and OneWorldTree.com's GenealogyCloud API.

Geni seems to at least gotten some traction with their API, with future support for syncing data coming from AncestorSync. Presumably this uses Geni's API. I haven't heard of other uses of the Geni API, however. If you know of other developers using the Geni API, let me know in the comment.

I have not heard of anyone using the GenealogyCloud API. If you know any anyone using GenealogyCloud, let me know in the comments.

As I predicted in the last article, MyHeritage introduced their own API, smartly named Family Graph. I say smartly because it is clearly mimicking Facebooks' Social Graph API. They're not comparing themselves to Geni, but to Facebook, which is smart. The other very smart thing they did was introduce a contest to develop applications that use the Family Graph API. If no one uses your API, what's the point right? The winner receives $10,000. The deadline for that contest is actually in about a week from now, with judging by a panel taking place in the first half of March and the results announced on March 15th. The real test will be the quality of the applications submitted, and whether the applications were submitted by individual developers or by larger companies. If the contest results are published next month with no major applications, then this will in my estimation be a setback for MyHeritage, not an achievement.

Conclusion

It will be very interesting to see how the introduction of GEDCOM X is accepted by the genealogy companies at large that are needed to make a new format successful. FamilySearch has some key advantages in that they are a non-profit organization (even though in many ways they compete with the large commercial companies like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com) and that they already have a large developer network. While many of the largest genealogy companies are not currently part of that developer network, if all of the ones who are start adopting GEDCOM X as their export format of choice, I think it will be hard for other companies to not adopt it. GEDCOM X's dual format/API functionality also gives it a major edge, especially if FamilySearch's legacy API is replaced by the API functionality in GEDCOM X.

Some have predicted there would never be a true replacement for GEDCOM, and others have said that technology such as AncestorSync's upcoming products would make the need for a file format unnecessary. I think both of these assertions are incorrect. There will be a replacement for GEDCOM, and it is necessary. Whether or not GEDCOM X is the ideal replacement seems to me to be a moot point. They will get the traction they need to push GEDCOM X into the mainstream. The real question is will they truly make it an open standard, or will they continue to hold it close to the chest? The real test will be when other groups insist on various features, and how they handle those demands. FamilySearch has put in all the trappings of an open and transparent development process, so let's hope they keep in that direction.

What's your favorite online family tree site?

Once you've built a family tree, it makes sense that you would want to share it with other family members online. There are a lot of good reasons to share your family tree online, including showing it to family members scattered across the globe, which can help you to get updates on your information from those same relatives.

The idea of making your family tree public on the Internet scares a lot of people, however, and for good reason. There are a lot of privacy issues with sharing information on family members online, including legal issues in some countries with sharing any personal information of living persons.

There are also many different ways to share family trees online. You can output a static web site from your desktop genealogy program, you can upload a GEDCOM file to one of the online family tree sites, or you can build one from scratch online. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these approaches.

The biggest family tree hosting sites are Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and Geni.com. All of them allow some form of free family trees, and all offer subscription services on top of those free options. There are also other sites, like AppleTree.com and WikiTree.com.

I want to start building a chart to compare these sites, from the perspective of hosting a family tree only. Do you use one of the above sites? Do you use another family tree hosting site? Do you build your own site using desktop software? Post in the comments what you like and don't like about the sites you've used for putting up your family tree online.

Based on the input people give in the comments, I will construct a chart showing the features as perceived by users of each site.

I'll start here by saying what I like and don't like about the sites I've tried.

Geni.com

Geni.com probably has the slickest interface of all the sites. It's flash-based and works fairly well. You can start from scratch and build a tree fairly quickly. You can also upload a GEDCOM file, although I haven't done that on Geni myself. You can also download a GEDCOM of your tree (although I believe this is a Pro feature). There is no desktop software that can connect to Geni.com, but they have created an API to allow such connections, so perhaps in the future there will be support for connecting via desktop software.

Upside or downside depending on your perspective, Geni is really trying to be one big tree. That means it's not really possible to have a private tree that only you and your family members can use. On the other hand, since everyone can find everyone, you can connect to distant cousins very easily. Once you find your cousin, you can merge your trees, but you can never un-merge your trees so you need to be careful. In my experience, I've found more distant cousins using Geni.com than on any other site. Geni.com also has some interesting features like Surnames and Projects, which let researchers work together on common topics.

Geni.com supports uploading photos and organizing them in albums. You can tag who is in each photo, and select the faces of each person so someone looking at the photo can see who is who. I don't think there is any kind of limit on how many photos you can upload which is really nice.

Geni.com is big on the social-networking aspect of their site, where you other family members see what you're doing on the site and can post comments on photos and send 'virtual gifts' on birthdays and anniversaries which sounds kind of corny but is actually nice. Of course, in a world where we've gone from sending real cards to people by mail to sending e-cards online, this might be an even further decline to sending 'virtual gifts' instead. I don't know, but I get virtual gifts from relatives that never sent me a card, real or electronic, so I guess there's something to say for that...

One thing which I really do think sets apart Geni.com is their support. I've had very good experiences with their customer support, and they've been able to fix various problems I've had in building my tree there fairly quickly.

Geni.com's Pro paid account, gets you the following features:

- Tree matches (i.e. while viewing your tree a small icon will appear in the corner of a person's box showing there is a match with other people on the site)
- Advanced search
- Forest GEDCOM exports (i.e. exporting a GEDCOM of your extended family tree including those people who you did not add yourself)
- No banner ads
- Priority support
- Unlimited virtual gifts

For pricing it seems their Pro account is currently $12.95 per month, $99.95 per year or $149.95 for two years. Geni.com used to offer a lifetime subscription for $299 but I don't see it now. Perhaps now that they have enough income they don't need to offer that anymore.

A sample Geni.com family tree

MyHeritage.com

MyHeritage.com works a bit differently than Geni.com. There is a concept of separate trees. People sometimes upload multiple GEDCOMs to the site making separate trees in one account. While this can be good, in practice there seems to be a lot of duplicate trees on the site. MyHeritage.com has a feature they call Smart Matching which looks for matches between the people in your tree(s) and other trees on their site. It then gives you a list of trees with matching people, and shows you how many matches there are. Recently they added a way to confirm matches between trees, although I'm not certain what that does considering the trees stay separate anyways. I guess it just lets others know that the people are the same.

MyHeritage.com supports many languages, although in my experience, if you live in a country that speaks a different language than yourself, this can be problematic as the site will always try to use the language of the country you're in (which it auto-detects). That's more of a nuisance than a real problem, but a nuisance nonetheless.

MyHeritage.com also supports image uploading, although it is limited on free accounts to 250MB. They have one feature that seems to be unique among all the family tree sites - they can automatically match people in photos to people in your tree using face recognition. Pretty neat.

Speaking of limits on free accounts, however, I forgot to mention the biggest problem with MyHeritage.com's free accounts - you are limited to 250 people in your tree. You might be able to upload a GEDCOM that has more than 250 people and get it accepted, but then you automatically lock out your account so that you cannot add new people to it. You can, however, get smart matches on the people in your tree. Note that even if you sign up for a Premium account, you are still limited to 2500 people in your tree. You need to sign up for the Premium Plus account to get unlimited people in your trees.

MyHeritage.com also has a free desktop app (Windows only) called Family Tree Builder. There is no limit to how many people you can add to their desktop software. It can also do face recognition on photos, etc. and it can sync a tree to the MyHeritage.com site. I haven't done this so I don't know how well it works, and if it is a two-way process. If you have used this, I'd love to hear about it.

MyHeritage.com recently added the ability to print out charts, and added a Memory Game that uses photos of your relatives in the game.

A Premium account adds the following features:

- Tree size up to 2500 people (instead of 250 on free accounts)
- Storage 500MB (instead of 250MB on free accounts)
- Enhanced Smart Matching (not sure what the real difference is between regular Smart Matching)
- Priority Support
- Ad-Free
- Power feature: Timeline

Their Premium Plus account is the same as the Premium account, except you get unlimited tree size, unlimited storage and another 'power feature' called Timebook.

On the pricing side, MyHeritage offers their Premium account for $75 per year (or $120 for 2 years or $225 for 5 years) and their Premium Plus account for $119.40 per year (or $191.04 for 2 years or $358.20 for 5 years).

Overall I would say MyHeritage has more features than Geni.com, but they are less polished.

A sample MyHeritage.com family tree

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com is more than anything else a site for doing record research. They literally have billions of records on their site, and if you're researching family members in the United States, it is a must-use site. Of course, they offer many other features – everything from family tree building to chart printing to DNA testing, etc. I'm going to focus, however, just on the family tree building aspect of the site.

Of course, one of the best features of Ancestry.com's family trees are the tight integration with its research features. When you build a tree in Ancestry.com, it will show you if it thinks there are records for people in the tree by placing a small leaf icon next to their names. Moreover, you can use the profiles of people in your trees when doing records searching, automatically filling in information on birth and location, etc. to help narrow down searches quickly. These are nice features to be sure, but not something that can be compared to other sites very well.

Ancestry lets you set up unlimited numbers of trees, each with different permissions, so you could have some trees public and some private, etc. You can invite family members to your trees, and give them different permissions on editing the tree.

I don't host my whole family tree on Ancestry.com myself, but what I do use it for is creating small trees for research purposes. For example, if I find a family that I think is related, but I haven't found the link yet, then I create their tree to the best of my knowledge and make it public on Ancestry.com hoping someone else will find it in a search and say they are related so I can find the link. I can't do that in Geni.com, since you only have one tree and I don't yet know how they are related.

Ancestry.com also has a desktop application that can transfer data to their web site, Family Tree Maker. On Windows, where is has been around for a long time, they come out with new version annually, the current version being Family Tree Maker 2011. On the Mac, they just released a new version after more than a decade out of the market, simply called Family Tree Maker for Mac. It is based on their previous windows release (2010). I don't believe it is possible to sync data in two directions between the desktop app and the web site, so this functionality is limited. You can, however, see hints on documents that might be relevant to a specific person in the tree from within the application, which is nice.

For pricing, I find the comparison a bit awkward since Ancestry.com is not primarily a family tree site. It's almost like their free family tree building is a loss-leader to get people to sign up for the rest of the site. I'm not sure what family-tree specific features you gain by subscribing to Ancestry.com, except the obvious which is access to their records. For some level of comparison, however, I'll list their subscription pricing. The US Deluxe Membership is $19.95 per month, or $155.40 per year. The World Deluxe Membership, which adds access to Canadian, UK, Ireland and other international records, as well as quicker access to new records, is $29.95 per month, or $299.40 per year.

Interestingly Ancestry.com has been beta-testing a new site called Mundia.com which seems to be intended as a direct competitor to Geni.com and MyHeritage.com. As it's still in beta there is no pricing set up yet, but they do have access to the trees on Ancestry.com, so it will not start out without anyone to match to when they launch. Perhaps when this comes out of beta, it will be easier to compare to Geni.com and MyHeritage.com.

A sample Ancestry.com family tree (note the leaves indicating record matches)

Other Sites

As mentioned, there are many other sites out there for building family trees online, including AppleTree.com and WikiTree.com, both of which look promising. AppleTree.com seems to be going after the Geni.com model of one big tree, while WikiTree.com is free and very focused on privacy concerns. I haven't used either of these sites extensively so I won't comment on them now, but if you've used them please comment on them.


So go ahead and tell me the best and worst of all the family tree sites you've used. What categories do you think are fair to compare against all of them? What is truly unique about any of the sites you've used? Feel free to champion the site you use.

If you work for one of the above mentioned sites, I welcome your input as well. Did I make a mistake in describing your site? Are there features I've left out? Let me know in the comments.

Pruning Your Family Tree

Cruft is a term used in computer programming circles to mean the useless code in a computer program that accumulate over time. Cruft is the stuff you added at one point that might have been important then, but is now irrelevant, and worse it causes the rest of your program to slow down. You might have needed, for example, to support what is now an obsolete computer platform at one point, but the code for that shouldn't still be in your program today.

Family trees also accumulate cruft over time, and just like in computer programs those extra people and extra information can slow you down. There are a number of reasons that bad information can enter your tree, but the most common and most problematic is when you import a GEDCOM from a relative without checking first to see if everyone in the tree is actually related to you. If you get a GEDCOM file from a relative with 2000 people in it and only 200 of them are actually related to you, you've just added 1800 that are irrelevant to your tree. Moreover, if you upload your family tree to a site like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.com where they can do some form of automatic matching between your tree and other trees as well as with records on the site, you're going to get all kinds of matches for people who are not actually related to you. Following up these false leads is a big waste of time.

I recently uploaded a family tree to one of these web sites and started getting matches to people not related to me. It illustrated to me that when I imported a tree from a relative a couple of years ago I did not properly check out the tree first. When I share a tree with someone, I usually only export those people who are related to the person I'm sending the tree to, plus spouses. This insures the person doesn't get a lot of records that are not relevant to them. When you receive a GEDCOM from someone else, you should also check it out, create a test file where you import it, add yourself to the file, and then see if everyone in the file is related to you. I obviously forgot to do this with this particular file a few years back, and ended up with about 300 extra people in my tree that I was not related to, which was what was causing these false hits in the matching program (technically they're not false hits, okay, but from my perspective they're just as annoying even if they are my fault).

After receiving quite enough of these messages from the web site I decided it was time to remove the incorrect records from my family tree file. While my initial guess about that GEDCOM file was correct, and it was indeed the source of most of the incorrect records, I also discovered something else interesting – that there were other people in my family tree that were not related to me, some of them that I wanted to keep. The important thing here is that while most genealogy programs will let you select all your relatives (and their spouses), it's not so simple to select your relatives and delete everyone else. The issue of the spouses, by the way, is a simple one. If you only had the program select your actual relatives, your sibling's spouse would not be chosen. Your sibling's kids would be chosen, but they would be missing a parent since strictly speaking that spouse is not your blood relative. Thus you need your genealogy program to select spouses as well.

The people I found in my tree that were not related to me fell into a few categories. Most were from GEDCOM imports, with most of those from that one GEDCOM I suspected, but also a few others here and there.

Some of the people were really cruft in that they were small sections that were someone isolated from the rest of the tree. I suspect they were descendants of someone I deleted at some point. They should probably have been deleted a long time ago, but were somehow still in my tree - probably due to a bug in the genealogy program.

Then there were the parents of spouses. I sometimes like to add information on parents of spouses that I add to the tree. This is mainly so that if I want to research the spouse at some point in time, that I know a bit more about them to help me with the research. Knowing the names of a person's parents can be very important when doing research. The problem, of course, is that if I do a standard selection of people in my tree that are not relatives or their spouses, these parents get left out – yet I still want them in the tree. The solution here is not simple. There is not an automated way to include these people. The answer is probably (and I have not done this yet) to flag those parents in some way. Some genealogy programs let you define custom flags, and then assign them to people. If you carefully check out all the non-relatives in your tree and see which ones you want to keep, you can then flag them for future reference. Each time you add non-relative parents, you can flag them. In the future if you go to prune your tree again, you can do a standard selection of relatives and spouses, and then add the flagged people. Anyone left over can then be removed from your tree.

The Future of Sharing (Genealogical Data)

It's no secret that the current standard for sharing genealogical data, GEDCOM, is woefully out of date. The last official revision to the GEDCOM standard, 5.5, was completed in 1996. A minor update, 5.5.1, was released in 1999 but never officially approved (even though some of its provisions have been adopted by various genealogy programs). Revision 5.5.1 added one very important feature - support for UTF-8 character encoding, which is a form of Unicode, which support multiple character sets (including, for example, Hebrew).

GEDCOM has, for all intents and purposes, been abandoned by the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) which created and owns the standard. The church has indicated that they will not be updating it, and indeed are replacing the need for it with a new API (Application Programming Interface) which will allow genealogy programs to exchange data with their website (FamilySearch.org). One problem with this approach is the need to go through their website, and the fact that they have not made this API publicly available (i.e. it's not a public standard, just a private interface to their web site). Another major problem is that there is no data format that allows one to create a family tree that can be shared independently, like GEDCOM is used today. FamilySearch in no way needs such a format, since their mammoth size and importance in the genealogical world will force genealogy program to support its API, as many have already done.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to either upgrade or replace GEDCOM. These efforts have all failed. In general the problem has been that the companies that create genealogy program need to agree to adopt any new standard, and they really haven't had much incentive to do so. Supporting the import of GEDCOM files allows them to support a basic file interchange, which never will support the full feature-set of their programs which have become much more sophisticated since 1996, but is enough to allow customers to exchange information with their relatives. If they supported a fully-featured GEDCOM replacement (that for example would better support photographs and evidence management), it would only make it easier for customers to try other programs. Thus the disincentive for the companies to support a modern replacement for GEDCOM.

Another problem with replacing GEDCOM has been arguments over the data model used. GEDCOM is based on a nuclear family data model (i.e. one mother, one father and their children). It assumes a nuclear family structure, and other forms of families are harder to support. This problem has caused some to support a data model based not on the family but on the individual. This is philosophical debate, and as you might imagine different people take very strong positions in this battle.

Even with this history, there are a few new initiatives to come up with a replacement for GEDCOM. One initiative that has garnered some attention recently is BetterGEDCOM. The BetterGEDCOM initiative came from the frustration of many genealogists over the lack of updates to GEDCOM and is an attempt to create an open forum for the creation of a new standard. Like many attempts at 'openness', however, it has run into its own in-fighting and conflicts. It remains to be seen how successful this attempt with be. Another recent initiative is the International OpenGen Alliance (OpenGen). This effort is a bit more of a top-down approach, being managed by the company that runs AppleTree.com, an online family tree web site. OpenGen is, however, a non-profit organization that is supposed to include more than just the team at AppleTree. There have been some attempts between BetterGEDCOM and OpenGen to coordinate, or at least follow each others' efforts closely. Time will tell which effort, if either, will be successful in creating a new genealogical data sharing standard.

In case you think it isn't complicated enough, other web sites beyond FamilySearch.org are also developing their own APIs for exchanging genealogical data. OneGreatFamily.com last year introduced an API called GenealogyCloud. It seems that no third-party applications yet support this API.

Geni.com, which boasts nearly a hundred million profiles on their site, and nearly 50 million that are interconnected in what they call their World Family Tree, just yesterday introduced their own API. Unlike FamilySearch.org, however, they are releasing documentation and sample applications on their web site. This will allow anyone to write applications that interact with Geni.com, similar to the way Facebook allows outside developers to create application that access information on Facebook. This is a very positive step. It's not coincidence that one of the other large family tree web sites, AppleTree.com, is pushing another initiative to replace GEDCOM (OpenGen). These large sites need to create ways to exchange data and interact with other programs and web sites in order to maintain their growth rates.

MyHeritage.com, another one of the big family tree web sites, has taken a slightly different approach in that they have their own application (Family Tree Builder) that runs on a computer, which can sync data to their web site. While this approach allows them more control over what modifies data on their platform, it has its shortcomings as well, not the least of which it requires Windows to run (this coming from a Mac user). I suspect that MyHeritage.com will release their own public API in the future, if only to compete with Geni.com, their biggest competitor.

We can always hope that FamilySearch.org, Geni.com, MyHeritage.com and AppleTree.com will all come together and create a single API and data format for sharing data, but unfortunately if the past is any guide, this is unlikely to happen.

One indication of the direction the wind is blowing in this regard will be the upcoming RootsTech conference, taking place in February 2011 in Salt Lake City. This conference is the first RootsTech conference, although according to the organizers it replaces three earlier technical conferences – The Conference on Computerized Family History, the Family History Technology Workshop and the FamilySearch Developers Conference. Note that these previous conferences were all connected in some way to the Mormon church. It's unclear how open this new conference will be to new ideas, or if it is really only looking for input for the existing Mormon church efforts such as FamilySearch.org. I imagine representatives from most of the genealogy software companies and web sites will be in attendance at the conference, as will people associated with the BetterGEDCOM and OpenGen efforts. During the week of the conference there will probably be a lot of blogging about what is going on, but the real test will be after the conference if companies announce intentions to seek a common API or data format to move forward with, or whether everyone will just continue the same disjointed approach that has been pursued for nearly 15 years.

Multimedia support in FTM for Mac - a bit lacking

Continuing my attempt to transition my family tree from Reunion to FTM for Mac, I wanted to discuss FTM's handling of image listed in the GEDCOM file.

So first, I like the fact that FTM has a Media tab where you can view all images in your family tree file. That is something I've wanted from Reunion for a long time. That said, it seems FTM's handling of the imported images is a bit sub-par. For starters, even though it has the correct path for each image file, it can't seem to find them. Reunion exports the standard Mac (and UNIX) file path to each image, which in my case begins with a tilde (~) indicating that the file is in a sub-folder of my home folder. FTM doesn't seem to know what that means. It lets you either search manually for the file or have FTM search for it. Either option works, but it would take forever for me to do this for each image.

Reunion has one very nice feature when a file goes missing (like if you move it to a different folder) where it lets you find the new location, and then it looks at all the other images that were in the same folder and updates them as well. This is a big timesaver and something FTM should emulate. THis in combination with the Media view that FTM offers would make a large task like changing all the image locations much easier to manage.

Truth be told, however, this task shouldn't be needed at all by FTM – if it understood file paths properly this wouldn't be an issue.

Taking a look at the GEDCOM file itself I can see that Reunion does something very nice – it exports the image cropping information. Frequently when using an image for a specific person you crop the image so it only shows that person. This is particularly true for the 'primary' image that one uses to represent the person in the tree. One can also use one group photo to crop out individual face shots of many different people. Showing the full image in a small window where you only want the head would be fairly useless. It's not clear to me if the _CROP tag that Reunion uses is part of the GEDCOM standard or some kind of generally agreed-upon way to share that information, but it seems to me that FTM ignores the information. Worse, and the likely reason, I can't figure out any way to crop photos in FTM at all.

I have a lot of complaints about Reunion's handling of media. I think it should offer to keep a library of thumbnails or even web-resolution images itself, so that it doesn't need to spend so much time doing image conversion when doing things like creating a web site based on your tree. I think it needs a central media view where you can manage all the images in your tree and make sure all the files can be located, etc. I think some integration with iPhoto would be nice. I think being able to tag photos with information on the people in them and the location information would be incredibly useful. Even with all of these complaints, FTM seems surprisingly inadequate when compared to Reunion in this area.

Launching Family Tree Maker for Mac and Importing a GEDCOM

I pre-ordered FTM for Mac when it was initially announced, and received it just recently. It comes on a single CD with a simple installer program on it. Launching the installer and running it, installs almost 500mb of stuff on your computer. Not exactly light-weight, but disk space is cheap these days, so that doesn't bother me very much.

After installing it, I run the newly installed program and find it is a bit clunky when launching. It tells me that the program includes a free 2 week trial of Ancestry.com, and asks if I want to sign up, or if I already have an account to enter my login information. As I have an Ancestry.com account already, I enter my login details and continue. Things are a bit slow here, as I think it's trying to communicate with Ancestry.com. I'm not sure how I feel about this connection from a privacy point of view. I certainly don't like that it slows down the program.

The good side of the connection to Ancestry.com is that it allows the program to access Ancestry.com and try to find records connected to the people in your tree. This is a very nice feature, especially since it doesn't require you to upload your whole tree to Ancestry.com where others can see it. If you want to publish your tree to Ancestry.com that is possible, but from what I understand syncing data between the online tree and the tree on your computer is not supported currently in the Mac version of FTM - but it is supported on the Windows version. A bit annoying.

The downside of Ancestry.com integration is the real question of how they protect your privacy. When you're a member of their web site, you have ultimate control over what Ancestry has access to because they only know what you put on their site. Having access to the whole tree is a whole different issue, and not one I'm sure they've addressed. There's no way to know what information is being sent back and forth. There's also the issue that you need to have a paid account with Ancestry.com to use this feature, obviously. As I have an account already, this doesn't affect me, but I wonder what features I will be missing if I decide to cancel my subscription to Ancestry.com?

So I exported a new GEDCOM from Reunion and told FTM to import it. The process was fairly quick, but it came up with over a hundred errors. I told it to load the error log, and something a bit bizarre happened - it launched the log in Notepad for Windows. Now you may be asking yourself how that is possible since I'm on a Mac – the answer being that I have a copy of Windows that runs in Parallels, an emulator. Even though Windows wasn't running at that time, Parallels is 'smart' enough to know that a Windows filetype was launched and will try to launch it in Windows. Now, whether this is misconfiguration on my part with Parallels, or whether FTM actually created a file that is a Windows Notepad file, I'm not 100% sure, but I can say that this feature of Parallels has never before launched windows when the file wasn't actually a Windows file, so I'm a bit confused. I think it would be nice of FTM to ask which text editor to use when launching text files (something Reunion does) to prevent this kind of mistake.

So what were the errors? They fall into two categories: Non-strict dates and non-standard GEDCOM tags. So first, it seems FTM is being strict about date formatting on import, which is not a bad thing, but annoying in that they don't give you a way to fix these mistakes as you import. Reunion is actually very good about keeping date formatting strict, and converts all dates you enter into a standard format, but the dates that FTM rejected seem to be dates that I imported from relatives in other GEDCOM files. They include things like:

1939?
END MAY 1936
1932 OR 1935

These are obviously problematic for a strict date system, but I think FTM should have asked me to correct them. Perhaps Reunion did the same thing when I originally imported the GEDCOM they came from, I don't remember, but there were not so many dates like that and it would be nice to fix them from the beginning. I'll leave it to the BetterGEDCOM group to come up with a way to support fuzzy dates in a standard fashion.

The second problem was unrecognized tags. Reunion lets you create custom fields and assign GEDCOM tags to them for export. FTM doesn't know what to do with these custom tags and does something very bad in my mind – it ignores them. Reunion actually added two of the fields that were ignored, a web site (tag URL) and an e-mail address (tag EMAL) that at some point was added to the profile of the exporter. It's perfectly normal to add an address and contact information to the information in the GEDCOM file about the person who created it, but I guess e-mail and web sites were not common enough when the GEDCOM standard was last updated for these to be standard tags, and thus FTM ignores them.

The other custom tag, which makes up the bulk of the errors recorded by FTM on import, was the NAMR tag. I may may have made that one up myself, but frankly I don't remember as it was such a long time ago. The tag is for the custom field I created for Religious Name. In Jewish parlance, the Shem Kodesh or Hebrew Name. For those people whose Hebrew Name I know, I add that to the custom field. Reunion exports it like any other fact about the person, which frankly is what it should do. Maybe FTM doesn't support custom fields at all, I don't know yet. If FTM does support custom fields and doesn't offer a way to create such a field on import, that would be pretty dumb. As you might imagine, going through the error log and figuring out which people had a NAMR tag (the log only shows the line # of the error in the GEDCOM file) and then adding this fact to each record in FTM would be a mind-numbing experience that I would hope is not necessary. As my knowledge of FTM at this point is fairly minimal, I'll hold judgment on this, but it doesn't look particularly good.