Over the past few years I’ve had an itch to do more family history, but the lack of good software stops me in my tracks each time. (Bad excuse, I know. I should still do the research anyway. But I digress.)
So, what would my ideal genealogy app look like? I’ve written about this before at BeyondProject.org, but it’s been a few years since then and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. ;)
And what am I looking for? Here goes:
Web-based. Why? It’s the future, but also because I want to get to my genealogy data from wherever I am, whether it be on my Mac at home, on my iPhone on the go, or on a PC at the family history center.
iPhone app. Speaking of the iPhone, I want a companion iPhone app that seamlessly and smoothly syncs with the web app (ala Simplenote or Dropbox) so I can access and edit my family tree when I’m not at a computer — and when I don’t have an Internet connection.
Fast. The genealogy web apps I’ve seen so far are pretty much without exception sluggish. Unacceptable. This means ixnay on the Flash. (Flash is fine for, say, videos and games, but for apps like this, it’s not responsive enough. Geni is a culprit, and moving out of the genealogical realm, so is Mint.com. Luckily HTML5 looks like it’ll eventually be able to replace Flash and provide a much snappier experience.)
Clean and minimal. Genealogical data is often convoluted, but that doesn’t mean our interfaces have to follow suit. Please stop trying to cram everything in. Let me see only the parts I need to see, and neatly tuck everything else away out of sight. Going along with this, it needs to be easy to add and edit information.
Search. I want search to be at the core of the app. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Google and Gmail, but being able to quickly get to any ancestor in my database simply by tabbing to a search field and typing their name (with autocomplete, of course) is very, very attractive. And even essential, I’d say. I also want to do all sorts of advanced text-based queries so I can see, for example, who on my Shanks line I’ve done research on in the last six months, or which ancestors died before they were 30 years old, or what information I’ve entered that’s marked “tentative” and needs to be verified.
Keyboard shortcuts. This hooks into the speed issue I mentioned earlier; with a good, thorough set of keyboard shortcuts, the perceived speed of the app gets a huge boost. I want shortcuts to navigate my pedigree chart with the keyboard, to add and edit data, to link people together, you name it.
Multi-user. I want to be able to work on my genealogy with my wife (hey, the wedding’s nineteen days away, I may as well call her my wife ;)) and my siblings and parents and grandparents. I don’t want a complicated interface for doing it; I want it to just work, seamlessly.
Integrated. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it’d be really nice for the app to be able to pull in, say, all my Flickr images that are tagged “genealogy.” Then I can let Flickr do what it does best — organize photos — and let the genealogy app do what it does best — organize ancestors — instead of trying to cover both. Ditto goes for videos (via YouTube or Vimeo). (Disadvantage to this: if something happens to your Flickr account, poof! Your photos are gone.)
Is all of this possible? Definitely. Everything here has been done in other apps before, actually. And no, I don’t know why the killer app for genealogy remains unwritten. Even taking the complicated data issues into account, it’s odd that the only web-based solutions that exist are slow and poorly designed (both visually and interface-wise).
Hopefully I’m wrong and there’s some awesome genealogy web app out there that I just haven’t heard of that meets all these needs, or at least most of them. If so, please let me know. :)
Comments
I would toss in the importance of being friendly with other apps. Being able to import from and export to some of the other major apps in use would be invaluable. The last thing I want to do is recreate my massive .gedcom/.paf files in another program. Functional and friendly I/O of data!
Funny you should blog about this now, because my wife and I were just attempting to get into family history last night. We went to new.familysearch.org and found it to be a vast improvement over anything we’ve used in the past. However, it still frustrated us to no end when it came to searching for relatives. So I’m going to give an emphatic second to your desire for a powerful search engine at the core of the software.
Part of the problem may involve privacy restrictions with living people, but it wasn’t clear just by using the site. So here’s a vote for intuitiveness as well. The software needs a little bit of Apple to go with its Google.
Ben, do you know what you’re doing? You’re setting yourself up to write/head this up. I’m excited for it, too. I’ll do your marketing. :)
I agree with your evaluation of what’s needed in a good genealogy app. I use Reunion on my Mac and have for about 15 years, but it still isn’t quite ‘there’ yet. I tried MacFamily Tree and it looks cool on my computer, but very boring online. Plus once the data is online, I can’t add to or delete from it. No web2.0 functions.
If (you) someone created something like you’ve described, I’d buy it and so would a bunch of people out there who want to do genealogy, but just don’t have the right app to encourage them to start.
Agreed. New FamilySearch is far, far, far too slow. It is really difficult to look at collateral lines, which is very irritating to me. With that said, it is great for what it is meant to do – decrease duplication of temple work.
I would say this hasn’t been done because there are not enough people who are both into genealogy and into technology. Sure, there are a few of us out there (um, I’m not really into technology, but I am more than some of my relatives who think I am a “computer expert.”) who would love a smarter way to do genealogy, but there are still lots of genealogy hobbyists out there who keep their records on paper. PAPER, Ben. PAPER! And they think that if you want to start doing your own you need to fill out a family group sheet. ON PAPER.
I’d say it all has to do with supply and demand. It will be here one day, though.
Funny, I was thinking about this just the other day. But you’re missing a MAJOR point, as I see it. Everyone keeps forgetting that genealogy is, in essence, almost identical to the kinds of technology building up around social networking, so I’d like to see my gen. program *look* like a social networking site…
…only, you know, for dead people.
( http://rockoldamerica.wordpress.com/ http://www.facebook.com/samuel.rockford )
CS 428 at BYU is in the early stages of developing a Twenty-Minute Genealogist program. Our goal is to make it possible to make actual progress even if you only have 20 minutes per week to spend on it, so our main features will be to keep track of context (remember the last person or people you were working on) and to suggest who might be a good person to research next. We eventually want to make an iPhone app and take advantage of the camera, so you can take pictures of things like headstones and link to them as sources, or so you can photograph microfilm or other records instead of making paper copies. We haven’t yet discussed searching or fleshed out a web interface with intuitive navigation, but I really like some of your suggestions. We’re using New FamilySearch as a data store, so it will be as multi-user as that allows, and that has a built-in way to prepare names for temple work, for those interested in that aspect of genealogy. I’ll try to remember to post a link once we have a real site up, but I thought you might be interested in hearing about it now.
There’s a huge amount of genealogical information online, and so little of it tells you where the information came from.
I’d like to see an app that helps people better cite their sources–that helps them work from sources, rather than forms. Rather than present you with a pedigree to be filled out, or a family group record, instead start with a dialog, “what document or source are you holding in your hand (or looking at)? Where did it come from? Is it a copy? Where is the original? What information is on that document? How soon was that document created after the event it describes?” and so forth.
I’d like to see a social network / genealogy app where people can vote on the quality of, and how well others in their network cite their sources. An application that insists on “no assertions without citations!” I.e., you can’t plug in a birth date unless you cite a source for that date. If the app worked from sources first as I describe above, this would come naturally.
Perhaps you could enter some assertions without citations (John Doe was born 21 Aug 1852) but the assertion would be grayed-out until you added a citation to back it up, and your citation was vetted by one or more people in your network as a ‘quality’ citation. At a glance you could tell how much of an individual record still needed verification.
Just some thoughts. Mark Tucker also had some great ideas which he outlined in a presentation at the FHT workshop in 2008 (See http://www.thinkgenealogy.com/2009/01/12/on-slideshare-10-things-genealogy-software-should-do/)
I’d also like to see more of what’s coming from the 20-minute genealogist group. Restoring context when researching is huge.
I totally agree with everything you’ve said. I like having my genealogy online but I also want it to be compatible with an iphone app. If you find a good app or program you have to let us all know.
I’d add Open, which is closely related to your Integrated point. I’m writing software for transcribing/annotating primary sources (initially old diaries), and it seems obvious that other apps may want to link to the mention of someone having a baby or dying or moving when it appears in a document, even if the document’s author was unrelated to the person mentioned. (This should not imply that I’m doing an especially good job of enabling this so far, however.)
On the other hand, I’m also trying to identify people mentioned in the text, and if I were able to search linked genealogy apps on the web with an API call requesting “show me everyone who lived in this county, in this timeframe, whose last name is X”, it would make my day. I know the data exists–it’s embedded within the court/church records that drive genealogical conclusions–but I don’t know of a good way to do a geo/time-limited search within genealogy apps. BYU’s Historic Journals Project is making a stab at this with their concept of a Roster, which associates people with places and times based on common membership in an organization, or such. Nevertheless, that must be manually entered, and in my opinion it should be derivable from standard genealogical record attributes.
I couldn’t agree more.
Throw in your two cents