Motivation

Some comments on the motivation and goals of the yology project.

Members of my extended family have put a lot of effort into gathering and researching genealogical records and family histories.  I have an interest in both learning what’s there and contributing further to it, but I think the tools for that are really lacking.  I am motivated to use my skills with computer / software technology to make that genealogy data accessible, and help to organize on-going efforts.

My first focus is to work on the Slade and Lofgreen family lines, currently available on SladeGenealogy.org.  The current state of that site: pages of family history narratives, and pages of generated pedigrees (consisting of 10,000′s of separate html files).  That data represents the compiled data at a single point in time, but it is now out of date.  It involves a fairly laborious process (for my mother, at least) to re-generate and upload the updated data.  Also, the ‘official’ compilation is kept in GEDCOM files passed around between my mother and other members of the family — the collaboration model is really tough.

I want to re-organize the SladeGenealogy.org site, and make it much easier to make updates.  To do that, I intend to replace all the static files with a dynamic database-driven app, likely implemented with Rails.  I want to explore some ideas for the pedigree layout and navigation, add some additional views (timelines, descendents, etc).  Also integrate the personal and family histories more directly.  Finally, I want to encourage other members of my extended family to get involved, to enjoy learning more about their ancestors, and to encourage them to contribute to the effort.

The needs I have for that site are not unique.  I think there are quite a few similar sites out there, plus many people that would like to compile (and share) their genealogies, if the tools made it easy enough.  There are quite a few existing online services to help with research and publishing genealogies.  However, I think many of them miss the mark, and many of them are premium (for-pay) services.  So, I hope to share my efforts with others, by making my code open-source.  I also hope to be able to leverage the efforts of others in the open-source community.

So, with this post, ‘yology.org’ is born.  I’m not sure exactly where to begin, or how fast I’ll be able to move, but here goes…