It seems like genealogy and pedigrees are eternally bound together — you don’t get one without the other. And since Beyond is a genealogy app, it follows that it’ll have a pedigree.

So, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. What’s the purpose of a pedigree chart? The obvious answer is that it’s to be printed out and put up on your wall. But in the context of actually working on our genealogy, why do we use it? (This is keeping in mind that there are also individual detail views, family views, etc.) Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Pedigrees help you see the structure of your family tree, specifically your direct lines. They don’t offer all the details (like your grandfather’s brother’s children), but they do show you the basics — the branches if you will. The leaves are all the extra details that flesh out your ancestor’s life and make them more than just facts on paper, and they’re mostly found in the individual and family views. As part of showing the structure, pedigrees naturally show you where the ends of lines are, which is nice when trying to decide which part of your tree you want to work on.

Now for the disadvantages: as mentioned, they don’t show collateral lines (like your grandfather’s brother), just direct lines. It’s also very easy for them to get cluttered.

With the purpose of pedigrees in mind — showing the structure — I think the information shown on a typical chart can be pared down quite a bit. What’s most important? The person’s name and their place in the hierarchy. The dates and places are still important, but not nearly as much as the name. Nor do you really need a ton of information there on the pedigree, because there’s an individual view which houses all the detail. Let’s keep it as simple as possible.

So, the name. It probably ought to be the full name because that’s a good way to differentiate relatives who have the same first and last name (like John Franklin Crowder and John Preston Crowder in the Pedigree Sandbox example).

Because we’re not using the pedigree to enter data (more on that later), we don’t need the full gamut of dates. All we really need is an idea of when they lived, and the standard birthyear-deathyear (e.g., 1819-1871) does that for us. If the death year is missing, “1819-” would give the impression that they’re still alive, so “1819-????” is probably better. (”-unknown” would have to be translated into all the languages and we’ll avoid that if we can.) If the birth year is unknown but the death year isn’t, “????-1871″. And if both are unknown, then the date probably should be left blank. (I’ve thought about using another existing date instead, like a marriage date, but it may get confusing. In those cases the person’s position in the pedigree should give a rough idea of when they lived.

Now for places. One of the things that you can’t really model in PAF is where a family lived. You can model where major events in the lives of the individuals took place (birth, marriage, death), but you can’t say “This family lived in Montgomery County, NC from 1830 to 1892.” For now we’ll probably display a compact version of the birth place and the death place, separated by a slash (e.g., “Montgomery, NC / Anson, NC”). All you need is a general idea of where the person was, because remember, this is just the outline of our tree.

More on the family modeling thing. It would be pretty nice to be able to have information about the family as a whole, rather than just the individuals. The closest thing is the marriage event (that’s what creates a family), but I haven’t seen any software that lets you treat the family as a distinct unit rather than as a linking together of various individuals. I want to say, “This family was Methodist,” or “This family lived in Riverton for five years, then moved to Georgia for the next thirty years.” I’ve added an example of what I’m envisioning to the Sandbox. You’d be able to click on the family as a whole and edit it. The advantage of something like this is that you can see in pedigree form most of the information on a family group record, in a much more compact format (more families per page). Judging by this test, you’d probably only be able to show three generations per page before it got full vertically.

Oh, I said I’d mention alternatives to pedigrees. The cascading (”drop-line”) format is one:

(from http://www.sog.org.uk/leaflets/chart2a.gif)

I’ll see if I can figure out a nice, easy way to do something like that in HTML. I probably wouldn’t include places on a form like this, and the dates would certainly be compacted, because there isn’t a whole lot of horizontal room.

One last thought: it’s probably better to be for the charts to be more vertical than horizontal because people are used to scrolling vertically. Is scrolling good for something like this? I’ll have to give it some more thought, because I don’t think I’m making much sense today… :)

Posted in Beyond, Design
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