I’ve been swamped lately and haven’t done much with genealogy other than stuff at work, but hopefully that’ll change. (Oh, the joys of school!)

First, thanks to Jasia for her mention of this blog in her Carnival of Genealogy:

We’ve already mentioned Dana Huff’s choice to use a blog to record her family history. Taking the same idea to a whole ‘nother level (or should I say planet?), we have Ben Crowder’s Genealogy 2.0 posted at BeyondProject.org. Ben discusses the need for collaboration on genealogy research but the conglomeration of apps he mentions would also create the ultimate recording of a family history, allowing for not just one author but many. I do believe this is the future of genealogy research folks. And probably the future of writing up the family history too.

Second, a week ago Dan Lawyer posted about better pedigrees. Here’s what it looks like:

This is the sort of thing I’ve dreamed about for a while. It’s really, really important to be able to see the whole picture; being zoomed in all the time makes it extremely hard to see the forest for the trees.

And as Dan says, there’s the cool factor. Smooth movement is fun. On my Mac, for example, hitting F11 makes all the windows fly to the edges of the screen so I can see my desktop; F9 takes all the windows on screen and makes them visible, kind of like putting photos on a table. And both of these are fun to do, just on the basis of watching the windows move around. Some may consider this sort of thing fluff, but it’s more important than you think. Far more important, actually.

In the comments for that post, Mark Butler mentions “persistent, user creatable, auto-updating charts that have just the persons or families or generations the user wants to include, ideally where the user has some layout control.” Sounds like smart folders/playlists/etc. in the Mac world. And I really like that idea! Imagine being able to say, “Show me a pedigree of all the people I’ve entered into my database in the last month,” or “Show me who had more than seven children,” or “Show me everyone who lived in Italy.”

Since these “smart pedigrees” would only hold a subset of one’s ancestors, it then becomes necessary to decide which way to display the results:

Option 1: Show everyone, but fade out those who aren’t in the results, like this:

This way you still see how people fit into the big picture, but you don’t have irrelevant results getting in the way either.

Other advantages of something like this (in coordination with being able to zoom and pan at will, of course) are that you could use it to show merging conflicts, or highlight certain tags (if you’re using a tag-based system), or spot migration trends (or any sort of trends, really), or any number of other very cool and very useful things.

For example, let’s say you’re using the tag “to-do” to mark the people and families you’re currently researching. When you feel you’ve done enough on that person or family, you remove the “to-do” tag. Now, if you set up a smart pedigree to highlight any “to-do” tags, it’ll automatically show you where you’re working at any given moment. As soon as you tag a new person, or remove an existing tag, the smart pedigree will be updated.

Option 2: Only show the results. This would be tricky because you’d end up needing many small pedigrees, all floating around in space unconnected to each other. I don’t recommend it.

I’d say that smart pedigrees are a must-have in any 21st-century genealogy app.

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