Yet another genealogy tool?

Yes, the project I’m currently poking away at is yet another genealogy tool.  There are a boatload of them already on the market (free, open source, commercial), so why does the world need another one?

Most “family tree” tools are just that – they help you create a pretty family tree.  I’ve used many of them, and the one thing they seem to lack is a nice way of dealing with all the research that may or may not be related to the family tree, or even worse, conflicts with the data in the family tree.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are some very well done tools out there: Legacy, The Master Genealist, Family Tree Maker, plus many more.  They don’t quite do what I want them to do, however.  (Or at least, not in the way I’d like to be able to do it.)

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve found your ancestor in the 1850 census and the 1880 census.  The 1850 census shows a birthplace of Ohio, but the 1880 census shows a birthplace of Pennsylvania.  Which one is correct?  Most family tree programs force you to enter one or the other (TMG being a notable exception).  What if one of those individuals isn’t in fact your ancestor after all?  How do you document which one is correct, but still retain the data for the person that is not your ancestor?  Most allow you to shoehorn in the data, but it isn’t always prominent – it gets buried down in notes or other fields away from the main screens.

At the other end of the spectrum is another nifty tool called Clooz.  This gives you the ability to store all your genealogical information (census records, birth certificates, etc) and quickly and easily search through them.  The part that it lacks, however, is a way to tie together these disparate facts into a family history.

I’ve made a couple of aborted attempts to create my own genealogy tool based on the GenTech data model (GDM).  The GDM works very hard to separate evidence, conclusions, and administration within the model.  The lack of clear separation is one of the things that frustrates me with the models of many existing tools.  The way that the GDM models conclusions uses a concept called assertions, which can be layered on top of each other.  It is a very powerful concept, but I could never figure out a way to extract out a family tree from the model.  That led to at least two projects being aborted.  This time around, I’m not going to try and follow the GDM.  I’ll use it as a guide, but I’ll go my own way as needs dictate.

There are a number of new technologies and tools that I think give this new incarnation a shot at being successful.  These include new development methodologies, such as Behavior Driven Development (BDD), which is an amalgam of Test Driven Development (TDD) and Domain Driven Design (DDD); new tools, such as NHibernate, iBATIS, SQLite, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF); and new patterns/models, such as Aspect-oriented programming (AOP), Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection, and DataModel-View-ViewModel.

This project will give me the opportunity to explore and play with all those tools and technologies.  Right now, I’m reading Jimmy Nilsson‘s book Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET, while trying to work my way through Charles Petzold‘s book Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (I learned Windows 2.0 from his first windows book – yeah, I’ve been writing code for a while).

I hope to start playing with some code before too much longer, and I’ll blog about it here.