Genealogy


I really want a good way of drawing family trees. The conventional representation as a sort of inverted tree gets very crowded towards the bottom, doesn't give a very good indication of the times people lived, and only the most rudimentary idea of relationships (marriage). What I have in mind is some sort of PERT(?) type chart with dates shown on a horizontal axis and people's lives shown as horizontal lines, with relationships (marriage, divorce, conception, birth etc) indicated by vertical connections, as I've attempted to show with this miserable piece of ASCII-art:
Married 1878 [------------+-+--+--------------] 4.4.10 Fred Flintstone | | | [-----------+-+--+----------------] 5.5.17 Wilma (nee Jones) | | | 2.2.80 [-|--|-------------------------------------] Tom ... 1.6.82 [--|-----------------] 11.11.18 Dick ... 7.1.88 [-------------------------------------------] Harriet + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 50 60 70 80 90 1900 10 20 30 40 50 60

I've used Lifelines, a Unix program (a DOS version also exists) which, apart from the usual functions for entering and browsing data, has a report-generation script language rather than built-in reports, allowing third parties to write their own reports.

One report program, called timelines comes close to the form of report I'm looking for. It only uses ASCII on an 80 or 132-column printer, but I hope I may be able to hack it to produce postscript or HPGL output (or betters till that someone else may do so!)

As with all serious genealogical databases LifeLines supports (i.e. can read and write) GEDCOM lineage-linked records for storing individual, family and source (etc.) records.


The list of links on my home page includes some genealogical Web sites.

There are also LISTSERV discussion groups for LIFELINES and GEDCOM,
or these fora can be joined via email by sending a message to LISTSERV@VM1.NODAK.EDU
with NO Subject: line and containing (in the Message body) only the line:

SUB LINES-L Your Name

or

SUB GEDCOM-L Your Name

where Your Name is e.g. Arthur Daley (not your email address!)
Make sure the message does not contain anything else (e.g. a signature)


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