Family Trees

Inspired by the celebration of my parent's 50th wedding anniversary and the photos of their wedding I've been looking around at genealogy software, not least because I know my mother would like to start researching this more seriously too.

After scratching about a bit over the last week or so I've narrowed it down to two products. The first is PhpGedView - a very smart bit of software that lets you display and manipulate genealogical data via a web browser. What's nice about it from my point of view is that it's multi-user, so I may be able to train Mom to use it ...

It stores the data using the GEDCOM format which was invented by the Mormons who are pretty obsessed with this stuff. Most genealogy software uses it.

That's handy as I would like something simpler than PhpGedView for displaying family trees to the wider family and that's where I'm hoping to use Dan Pidcock's gedcomToHTML. Certainly some of his examples are clear and easy to read, easier than PhpGedView, although a lot less detailed.

I've already installed PhpGedView on one of our servers. I did that last night and tonight I've been bashing in data as quickly as I can so at least I've got a basic family tree done. Then I need to see if gedcomtoHTML parses the GEDCOM files too but I think that's a job for another day.

Oh, and less of a cough today, although it's still there. I have got some work done though, which was good: I've lost far too much time over the last three weeks.