What features do all Family Tree Programs lack?

[mikechristopher]

One feature I would like to see is the ability to easily distinguish between confirmed ancestors and speculative ones. Many people in their research come across possible ancestors and rather than record them on endless pieces of paper that all too easily get lost it would be good to put them directly on a tree to see where they might fit in.

How I envisage it working is all confirmed ancestors would be in one colour and all speculative ones in another so at a glance you could see where further research was needed.

And if this facility already exists in some FT programmes please break it to me gently and I will go and have a doh!  moment 

I completely agree this is one feature I have been thinking of for a while and would be so useful - having it slightly greyed out in comparison to relatives that have sources against them and have been confirmed.

Another one for me would be to have a checklist / to-do list of sources.  I know ancestry nicely link sources into the tree but would like others to have this feature - for example I could print a family group report and would put a checklist next to them for birth, marriage, death record sources etc.

[McGroger]

davidft and mikechristopher, regarding “Speculative” people:

The program I use (MacFamilyTree) has a system that may partly answer your request.  You can put different “Labels” on people and then use “Smart Filters” to produce a list of like people, which can be printed out if you wish. (Probably other programs have similar “workarounds” like this hidden amongst their features.)

Example: The standard label options are: Important; Incomplete: Noteworthy; and Private. You can also make up your own. So could label a number of people “Speculative”. Then if you wanted to see a list of those people you can create a “Smart Filter” that filters out all other people except those labelled “Speculative”. (The “Smart Filters” have other purposes - this is just one use to which they can be put.) The Person List also has options for including things like birth and death dates, birth and death places, ages and Kekule numbers.

I use the above system for labelling and listing people I haven’t finished documenting - e.g. sources and citations, place coordinates, media items. When I do complete them I remove their label and - in theory! - reduce my list of incompletes.

But these are all only in the editing pages, so you can’t for example distinguish a “Speculative” person in the family tree charts or in reports. The only thing I can think of to achieve that would be to give them distinguishing additions to their names, e.g. naming a speculative Dougal McGregor as ?Dougal McGregor or some such.

[Rosinish]

One feature I would like to see is the ability to easily distinguish between confirmed ancestors and speculative ones.

I would say for that...when you type in the name, put John (possible/spec) Smith i.e. when you do your 'view' of 'Index of Individuals' you will be able to tell they are only possibles?

I can do that on FTM if I wish to.

Annie

[PaulStaffs]

Surely everyone's tree has lots of "possible ancestors"? The commercial software providers are missing a trick here.

Most FH programs (more or less) stick to the gedcom standard which doesn't allow for 'possible ancestors'. Most programs will allow you to use custom tags however so you could mark all your 'possibles' in that way. The problem with doing that is forgetting or deleting a tag means that person becomes a part of your accepted tree.

I put unverified information about possible ancestors into a note of the nearest related individual headed by a comment. For example, I have a supposedly well researched line of ancestors going back to 16xx but I've never had time to follow it up, so all of that information is stored in my ggggf's notes under the heading 'possible ancestors, information from...' or something like that. Works for me and hopefully its meaning will be clear to anyone who inherits my data.

[BrazilianBombshell]

Decided finally to invest in a proper FT Program but couldn't decide which one.   I've tried one or two in the past, however always returned to paper methods and USB's.  After reading your comments I'm inclined to agree with MacGroger Reply no. 2. Am I expecting too much for a simple FH program for a Windows 7 PC?

[joboy]

Possibly already included in one of the programs but I'd love some way to be able to record witnesses to marriages etc, which could then also be searched within the main database.

Totally agree Jomot .... a man named Wildey from NZ saw the value in having a 'Marriage Witness Index' (MWI) a few years ago ..... I was a follower and a contributor along with a fellow Keith Flinders from NZ and we conjointly tried to invoke interest in a number of areas but there was little or no interest.
I tried on rootschat but it didn't get off the ground.
I see that someone is moving in this direction so you could try here;
http://www.genealogybuff.com/misc/ukmarwit/ukwitlnd2.htm
I think an MWI on rootschat is long overdue.
Joe

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

As a newbie, I'm months late to this party but maybe I can still contribute. Back in the stone age of computer software, I used to develop some of it. As a ICT-dinosaur and amateur genealogist, Mikechristopher's great question resonated with me.

Back in the stone age of ICT we used to develop 'relational databases'. That meant that the 'data records' were separate from the many and various 'interrelationships' that could exist between these data records. Updating data records would't change the interrelationships. Adding or updating interrelationships wouldn't change the data records. Users were  'presented' with the data and interrelationships that were relevant to their queries.

The same principle is true today for almost all genealogy websites/software. We can update the data for a 'person' without changing family relationships. We can also change the relationships without changing the 'person' data.  The main limitation of popular websites and offline-software is that the choice of relationships is limited to the obvious family ones: father, mother, spouse, child. Technically it would be a no-brainer to add data and relationships such as 'possible birth-date, possible death-date, possible father, possible mother, possible child, possible marriage, possible residence', etc. I suspect that the decision to limit the options is more driven by marketing (to beginners) than by a lack of technical capabilities.

Mikechristopher's question helped me to look into the difference between 'person-based' record-keeping' and 'evidence-based' record-keeping. Ideally, these are not mutually exclusive. Popular websites/off-line software does however tend toward 'person-based' record keeping.

Like McGroger, I also use family tree offline (synched with Ancestry online). I like his tips and I intend to use these!

I'm a relative newbie but it seems to me that everyone has to figure out how best to keep track of 'people facts', 'source documents' and (possible) 'relationships' separately. I googled 'genealogy separate people relationships sources' and found software I'd never heard of before!

Mike

[RJ_Paton]

Possibly already included in one of the programs but I'd love some way to be able to record witnesses to marriages etc, which could then also be searched within the main database.

Totally agree Jomot .... a man named Wildey from NZ saw the value in having a 'Marriage Witness Index' (MWI) a few years ago ..... I was a follower and a contributor along with a fellow Keith Flinders from NZ and we conjointly tried to invoke interest in a number of areas but there was little or no interest.
I tried on rootschat but it didn't get off the ground.
I see that someone is moving in this direction so you could try here;
http://www.genealogybuff.com/misc/ukmarwit/ukwitlnd2.htm
I think an MWI on rootschat is long overdue.
Joe

This can be done in Family Historian

[Nick_Ips]

Interesting comments Mike, but are you really such a dinosaur? Wouldn't relational databases be more bronze-age than stone-age?

I think I have, perhaps by accident, adopted a kind of hybrid approach in that I use both a family history programme (off-line) and a collection of databases which store sources of information and 'things to do'.

The family history programme is essentially a front-end which makes it easy manage and display the 'person' data, and I use it mainly because my technical skills aren't up to developing similar functionality. The programme is old (obsolete) but I use it because it has functionality to import and export data in a way which is convenient. It also automatically assigns each individual a reference number which is my unique identifier in the external databases I have built.

These external databases are my records management, so contain things like census records (per household/year), BMD records, Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths. When a new dataset becomes available I just build a new database, or a new table in an existing one, to contain the new data. For example, the census database will contain one record per household per census year, with each individual per household having a separate record linked to that household. One field in the individual's record contains the unique reference number for that person in the family history programme.

That way I can produce a report showing all the records of the various different types I have for a particular individual - I can also identify if a particular record type is missing for them (e.g. which people do I still need to find on the 1939 Register?) Likewise, I can identify if there are other people in a household who I've not investigated and have a look at them if I've got nothing else to do.

The final element is my 'things to do' database. I keep track of each individual's records and if there are missing bits of information to look for. Within this database I have notes of when I've last looked for missing data and any clues I've found. It is also a store of future things I need to do, so for example if information is needed from a particular record office this will be recorded. Then when I'm planning a trip to that record office I can simply extract all the 'jobs' that I can do while I'm there.

The bit I'm happiest with is that because the data is all linked (in the way I want it to be) I can print a list of jobs to do which also contains relevant facts about the person. So for example if I'm looking for a particuar census record for a person I'll have with me the places of residence and occupations of the person in previous and subsequent years.

So yes, I was frustrated at the limitations of the then available family history software and have ended up with a hybrid approach of person and records-based data.

My biggest grumble with the family history programme I use is similar to the 'speculative people' one davidft raises. For some people who are very distantly related I may know who their parents are, but I don't want to add the parents individually to the database as they are so remotely related to me. It would be nice to attach a 'fact' to the individual to detail the parent(s) name(s) which the programme would interpret as being separate individuals when necessary or useful (e.g. searching for someone). I have a workaround of entering the parent's names into an unused text field (Occupation) but this only works as a note rather than having any functionality.