Slashdot Mirror
Best Open Source Genealogy Software?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm looking to build a family tree for a holiday gift. Do the Slashdotters of the world have any recommendations on open source genealogy software? I did try a 14-day free trial of Ancestry.com. What a scam! I submitted the personal information for my parents, grandparents, and me. Then, I received a pop-up telling me that if I would like to get information on my family, I would have to upgrade my subscription for $29.95 US. So, I took the chance. Turns out that the only information they had was my previous addresses for the past 20 years." The venerable GRAMPS is still actively developed, and its site lists several other possibilities, too. Any favorites, or anti-favorites, out there?
If you want it online or even locally, webtrees is the most current open package. active development team and community based forums will assist you where required. www.webtrees.net.
does everything you need and more!
I've used GeneWeb and really liked it. Written in OCaml, but appears to be dormant. Nothing much has happened with it for a few years now. Still a pretty good program though.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Geni.com is an online service, not open source software per se, but it's free to use, useful, and there's a lot of data there already. I found my ancestors going back to the 17th century after matching up my own tree back to my grandparents. http://www.geni.com/
davejenkins.com |
My grandma has givin me sooooo much skini on the family its not funny. Didn't cost me a dime other than my time. Trust me... they don't hold back and will give you info can not find anywhere. They are the source.. if they aren't available, talk with the gossip of the family. Each family has one. Find them, then prepare yourself for A LOT of bad news.
For basic usage, any program that supports GEDCOM (the de facto file format all good genealogy software support) will do, and your choice should be on your personal preference. So try them out first, of find your local genealogy association and ask around. Personally, I have good experience with Gramps (you already found that one) and ProGen (a dutch commercial program). The latter not being open source, it'll probably not be interesting to you.
For more advanced usage, you should know that some programs assigns a different meaning to some standard fields, and most programs have their own way of filling in custom fields. If you find yourself using such features, please consider who you'd be sharing your GEDCOM files with, and use the same. Note though, that it'll likely not be open source.
not open source, but the mormon's offer a nice little program for free: http://www.familysearch.org/eng/paf/
I remember my parents doing some genealogy stuff, they used a program called PAF (Personal Ancestor File), I think it was free. There's also https://www.familysearch.org/, where you can look people up for free as well. These are both free even if you are not an LDS member. Not sure what exactly you need the software to do for you, but I remember with PAF my parents printed out a big ol' pedigree chart, found out we were related to some kings back in the dark ages, pretty crazy stuff.
I personally use PHPGEDview. If you need something web-based, this is a great piece of software. It lets my whole family, all around the country, work on the tree.
http://www.phpgedview.net/
Maybe the poster wants to be able to freely distribute the software and resulting files to family members?
It sounds pretty reasonable to me, especially after being boned paying for something.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
http://www.ahnenblatt.com/ Ahnenblatt is free, but I don't recall it having the source available. My housemate has used this program solidly for 3 years and has found it good and easy to use.Hasn't been updated for about a year on the website, but I think a newer version on their forums is available.
For sites like Ancestry.com, you really need to have a good few generations (4-5, minimum) to start getting good results back, since quite a bit of it is crowd-sourced links from distant relatives. Even at that point, there are a few points in history where the records / links just suck, and it usually takes quite a bit of digging to find another link. Over the course of roughly a month, and with some good spots of luck, we were able to trace back several lines of my family through Ancestry.com, and other sources for several hundred years.
Fortunately, there's a standard file format for genealogy data, and Ancestry (and other sites) usually support exporting to it.
Unfortunately, my data yielded a genealogy chart that most of the current open source or free software couldn't render very well. I've been considering writing one myself, that at the very least could render out multiple pages at once for printing, rather than manually forcing the user to set things up correctly for each sub-branch...
PAF aka Personal Ancestral File.
Weirdly, this software, developed by a church, wins my award for the very BEST Macintosh software ever, in the category of Compatible With The Most Versions of Mac OS.
Originally, this program cost money, but not very much. I bought it for the Mac 512 or thereabouts. It came on floppy disk, probably about 1985. Years later, when Macs had color, low and behold, the PAF screens were in color. They had followed the compatibility guidelines, and put in simple color years before anyone could see color on a Mac. The SAME version of software continued to work for decades, through major system and processor revisions that broke almost everything else. I think it finally stopped working with System X, (about 5 computers later, for me) when it wouldn't work under Classic for some reason.
Pretty much everything else became incompatible once or more during that time, including Microsoft and Apple. Amazing!
Computers obey me.
Make directories with all the names and use `tree`
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As far as research, Social Security Death Index, Ellis Island Records, US Censuses up until 1930 (1940 will be released on April 2, 2012), European censuses and so forth have all been useful. Ancestry.com has scanned ship manifests on it, with the names OCR'd, which was useful for me. It also had draft cards, passport applications and other things.
Records don't tell everything. I told my mother I found her mother's birth on a European census form, which said 1 month old or something. She told me that her mother's mother had a girl that died shortly after she was born, soon after which she became pregnant and had my grandmother, who got the same name as the baby who died. I had never heard about this before. If I hadn't been told that, I would assume a girl born in that year with that name would be my grandmother for sure. So family memory can often trump records. In the "Godfather Part II" the immigration officer is in a hurry and mixes up the last name and town of origin, in a few seconds with a stroke of the pen the family's name is changed. All kinds of things happen - birthdays are changed by purpose or accident, people flee Europe to avoid military draft, family memory often trumps official records.
My daughter is using Ancestry.com to create a great genealogy. Through it, she has accessed old immigration and census records and more recent death records. Although all her grandparents are dead, she has been able to extend the genealogy back to her great-great-great grandparents and include many 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cousins. By granting read-only access to cousins, my daughter has also been able to get details from them about current and past relatives.
Do it yourself. There is no substitute for creating your own database/worksheet. Why in the hell would you even trust what was given to you by a subscription fee? Just because you pay you trust it? In my experience, it is much more rewarding and valuable if you do the work yourself. We took a ton of time and effort, but our family has the real truth with real documents (copies) and contacts thousands of miles away.
If your ancestry is important to you, do it yourself. Don't take shortcuts. The risk of being misled/wrong are too great. Even doing this ourselves, we were taken down false leads. Imagine someone who does not have a stake doing something so important for you.
Moe
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
I'm looking to build a family tree for a holiday gift.
To be presented in what year?
#DeleteChrome
I don't work for ancestry.com, and they don't pay me. I recently signed up ancestry.com to research our family geneology. My biggest complaint is the search functionality often returns way too much data. Their search/matching algorithm is quite eager. The service isn't cheap, but then again how much would it cost to manually do the research yourself? How much time would you have to spent going through dusty census records? How much time do you have to spent tracking down the geneology going back up the tree? It took me a few days to understand how their search works, but once I got a hang of it, it was easier to find records for people in our family tree. It's not perfect, but it does quite a bit. If I had to search census records going back to 1910, it sure as heck would cost more than a monthly subscription.
GRAMPS is the best OSS piece of software I've found so far. You can also export it to PhpGedView (a very nice OSS web-based application)
Pro tip: *Always* record your sources, for every scrap of info (GRAMPS lets you do this), that way when (Not "If") you have conflicting pieces of information, you can figure out which one to trust. GRAMPS also lets you assign a 'reliability' to each piece of information.
The only problem is that exporting to GEDCOM format loses a lot of this kind of 'extra' data. (IE, exporting is a lossy process, so use GRAMPS as a master, and if you want to put your tree online, use that as a secondary source for family members to add to.)
As far as resources go, Ancestry.com has a bad habit of suggesting that they have a ton of matches in all these different databases, when in fact most of the matches returned don't have any relation to the names you entered. Don't base your decision to subscribe solely on that.
That being said, many public libraries offer free access to some, or many, census records and other public databases.
If you have Swedish ancestors, GenLine is EPIC: Digitized church records (Swedes often had data recorded annually instead of every 5 or 10 years, and also recorded moves into and out of parish districts.)
GRAMPS is an outstanding piece of software. When I first began using it a few years ago, it was a little rough and it was difficult to install on Windows. This made it great for me while running Ubuntu, but difficult for me to recommend to family members. It seems to have much better support now under Linux, Windows and Mac. It also uses an open XML-based file format that at least one working group is looking at as the basis for an updated standard to replace the aging GEDCOM format. I think this is definitely the candidate for best OSS Genealogy.
PHPGedView is another good, open-source, web-based genealogy package. This is a good one to use if you're planning to build your family tree collaboratively among several family members. My biggest complaint about it is that it's a little clunky looking and some family members seem a bit intimidated by it, so they don't make changes or additions when they could. I began building a new theme and layout for it, but I put it on hold when I felt like it was taking time from working on the family history itself. Of course, it also requires that you have a server to host it on.
A similar online family tree is Wikitree.com. It looks promising, but I haven't yet found a good way to sync changes between it and my local genealogy software. It's still in its infancy though.
All that said, my favorite genealogy software is the closed-source Legacy Family Tree. The standard edition is free and the full "deluxe" version is inexpensive. Unfortunately, it's Windows only (I've had mixed luck running it through WINE). It's advantage though is that it's very easy to install and use and has some powerful tools for sourcing and merging trees. It also creates some very impressive, customizable family tree charts that can be saved in a variety of formats or printed through their mail-order service. It also saves your genealogy database in several formats including GEDCOM.
Ancestry.com is the necessary evil of the genealogy world. They have many records on their site that aren't available elsewhere on line, but they have made quite a few business decisions over the years that don't sit well with many family historians. They also produce the "Family Tree Maker" software which I recommend avoiding.
Lifelines
It's console based, but it's fairly powerful for that. Once you learn the navigation keys (and there's a help window at the bottom of the screen), then you can walk up and down your family tree with ease. It reads in GEDCOM, allows you to edit those records as GEDCOM (so you have a lot -- perhaps too much -- freedom in record structure and normalisation), and it exports in GEDCOM as well, as well as a scripting language which allows for all sorts of reports and outputs. You can even tell it to keep records in UTF8.
It is a record/database manipulation program: you will need to gather your data yourself, and enter it by hand. While the actual entry process is tedious (which, to be frank, will always be the case, flashy GUI or not), it is a good opportunity to go over the data and discover incongruities and patterns.)
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Yes, you have grasped a big part of it. Nearly everyone in America is descended from immigrants at some point, and on top of that, we have been the most "mobile" society on Earth; families moving from home to home on the average of every few years.
This makes keeping track of genealogy a particular problem.
PAF is obsolete, but still viable.
If research is what you need, don't overlook Family Search. It works best if you can start with someone long dead. If you want one-on-one assistance (for free), stop by an LDS Family History Center. Yeah, we're "Mormon's", but the family history advisers must not be overtly preachy (if they are, they're not following instructions). Just bring everything you've got.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Any software you find is likely just going to be a database entry/maintenance type software tool for storing your genealogical information, but itself will not give you any information; it just provides a place for you to keep track of information you do find from other sources.
If you are stuck on open-source, I'm not sure how to help you, but if all you really care about is that it is free, I can strongly recommend Personal Ancestral File from here. While it has some fields for Mormon ordinances, you don't have to use those features and it will do nicely to maintain your records.
As for doing the actual research, again I recommend looking into the Mormons - they maintain branches of their main family history library at various church buildings around the world. The volunteers who staff those branches are instructed to not proselyte, they simply are there to help you do the research. The only time you'll have to pay for something is for obvious things like using the copy machine, or if you want to have records shipped in from Salt Lake City you'll have to pay postage, but that's it.
Disclaimer: yes, I am a Mormon, so I may be biased on this matter, but as far as I've seen, the Mormons are the premier experts in the world when it comes to family history research.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
Same here. Anyone wanting to try Gramps on windows should download the portableapps.com version so you don't have to bother with installing the dependencies. http://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Download
A month ago, I found GenerationX, an open source Mac OS X GEDCOM editor. (GEDCOM is a standard genealogy file format.) Unfortunately, the version I found was very old. It was PowerPC-only and crashed on launch on Snow Leopard.
I took the source on SorceForge, fixed many of the compiler and static analyzer warnings and removed the expiry code.
You can find my fork on github:
https://github.com/paulschreiber/generationx
Be careful — this is still beta quality.
You mean like this? https://familysearch.org/
Mod parent up. It's a free service, frequently updated from various sources, goes back centuries, and even includes a series of online lessons on how to do your family history. Backed by Mormons, but that doesn't make it any less of an awesome service. (Disclaimer: I am a Mormon)
If not, then why would you want it to be open source?
If I was going to be spending a reasonable amount of time inputting data that I want to access for an extended period of time I would want it to be an open source program. That way you can always get the data out of the program again (possibly with some effort) and you are not stuck with regular upgrade fees for the latest version with the bug fix neeed to make it work with the latest OS version.
While this is true that one of the main purposes of the Church's work in genealogy is to perform baptisms for the dead, the way you've said it ignores a key point. The LDS (Mormon) Church's policy is to only allow baptism to be performed for the dead when a family member specifically requests it. If you are not comfortable with this, then you don't have to allow it. And PAF itself doesn't upload to the Church's main databases. FamilySearch.org and its tools can be used to locate information about ancestors, and if you want, you can only take things, and not submit additional information. Speaking as a Mormon, we don't want, nor ever have wanted, to offend anyone, either of our faith or not. And as the Church has invested lots of time and effort, we'd like to share that with anyone that would like.
My parents have been collecting genealogical records for 30 years. For a long while they were keeping records on BrothersKeeper, but I think that was an old-mac only program. I switched them to Gramps (and Linux) a few years back. Btw, the only help I've had to give them was updating OS.
Baptisms for the dead don't happen unless a family member submits the name for that specific purpose.
Not true. Historically the Mormon church does them for anyone they have genealogy details. They came under a lot of controversy in the recent past by doing baptisms for Jewish people killed in the Holocaust.
This 'baptism for the dead' thing annoys me for one reason: If I have an offspring who, long after I'm dead, adheres to the LDS and wants to baptise me, he can. And that something I do not want. Maybe there's a way to opt out while I'm still alive, but if I wanted to be a mormon, I would. And I don't.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The wrongful baptism of Jewish dead, which disparages the memory of a deceased person is a brazen act which will obscure the historical record for future generations... We will continue opposing this wrongful act which assimilates our dead to the point where it will not be possible to know who was Jewish in their lifetimes.
...
A commentator on this topic said that anti-Semites who desecrate Jewish cemeteries want to destroy even the memory of Jews by breaking their tombstones and other symbols whereby we honor and remember them. He concluded that baptism of the Jewish dead is just a more sophisticated form of breaking tombstones.
I'd call him an idiot, but I don't think he is. Though his argument lacks all merit, it skillfully manipulates emotion and fights to demonize his admitted adversary. No, I don't believe he's an idiot. I think he's a troll. It's either that, or he pays a lot of attention to them.
Have mistakes been made?* Sure. The only side effects are some accidentally bruised egos and extra ammunition for Mormon haters. Has history been revised? That's ridiculous to the extreme. Nobody's going to claim holocaust victims were Mormon because of vicarious work. Are we going to claim 15th century nobility were Mormon because their work has been done? How about signers of the American Declaration of Independence? What about census records? Do they think that we'll eventually revise history to say that the entire US was Mormon in the 1900's? Will we ever be able to say that every immigrant through Ellis Island was Mormon?
There is no way to look at this that doesn't quickly devolve into the absurd.
*(From published records which shouldn't have been used in the first place. PAF doesn't phone-home or any such.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
BTW the wife which is a most serious genealogist ( 55000 people in her tree ) and has documents and photos or paintings for most of them received a lot of help from the LDS centers.Whether you share their ideals and ideas is besides the point.Their research units are fantastic we have been to 2. They welcome genealogists from all over and from all confessions. And before you ask i'm a an atheist without ties to LDS.
Clearly, the submitter wants to audit the code to make sure the software is not phoning home, allowing the software authors to steal his great-great-grandparents' identities.
Mothers maiden name is a common security question.
Trojaned Genealogy software could help with that aspect of identity theft.
Work bio at MMWD