Dear Lazyweb: Geneology/web?

[da]

I was wondering if anyone on my friends-list has done any family-history and have any programs or web-services to recommend. I don't have a ton of time to spend on it, but I have 5 pages of family-tree which I'd like to clean up and record somewhere in a reusable format.

One of my mom's relatives uses 'Reunion' for mac. It's $100, which is a pretty penny for a not terribly attractive-looking program.

Open options are: a mac program, a web-based system so long as I can keep records private and I trust the service-holder, or a windows or linux program if it's quite a bit better than anything available on the mac (since I've got Parallels and the latest version works quite nicely.)

A quick look around the web suggests that a major complaint about geneology programs is that they all use different tweaks to a common format, which suggests they're all mutually incompatible. Grr. It's quite possible I'm overlooking something good, which is why I throw myself on your mercy.

Thanks.

Comments

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

I have not looked at this page at all, but I remember Marj, retired now from our department, is seriously into genealogy stuff. If it doesn't produce something you can use, perhaps it will at least be a pleasant diversion.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Oof, that's quite the collection of links. It might be an interesting diversion, though since I'm the first Canuck in my family, it's likely mostly a diversion. (The only tools she talks about are information-collecting ones, not sorting).

Thanks, though!

[sulle-stelle.livejournal.com]

I think you found an application coding project for the crack team at coder.com! :-)

(It certainly doesn't seem, at first blush, to be a terribly complicated project to do, since you're just making a tree with nodes......)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

...plus, done properly, attached data for dates, place-names, information source(s), and notes, all attached to a person or a group of people and possibly inter-connected. And not to mention divorces and name-changes, and presenting the information so it doesn't look like a dog's breakfast.

Actually, it could be fun, but very time-consuming to do well enough to suit my needs let alone for anyone else! (I wouldn't need most of the above features, but if this weren't one of a dozen programs that do it poorly, I bet it would need at least all of those features.)

Oh, and being "fast enough" with all of the database lookups. For whatever reason, it seems a lot of mac geneology programs are awfully slow, according to one reviewer at least.

Hm. If I could take the time to do it well, it might indeed be a fun project.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Look into what the Mormons use. They're the biggest genealogists out there...