Because I apparently can’t stop making genealogy charts: here’s a pedigree chart I put together as an experiment to see what things would look like if the more recent names were larger. The result:
I do like the larger names, but it seems that on the left side of the chart the hierarchy is harder to read. This kind of chart might work better with just four generations instead of six.
A simple chart to hopefully make it easier for beginners to tell Hebrew characters apart (since several look a lot alike).
Apparently I’m in a language-chart-making mood. This time, though, the nerdiness quotient jumps dramatically, with an Ogham alphabet chart. Ogham is a medieval alphabet used for Primitive Irish and Old Irish and a few other languages. Very obscure, but also very cool, as you can see:
It can be written both vertically and horizontally. The red letters are the transliteration (according to manuscript tradition), the grey letters in brackets are the pronunciation, and the italicized words are the names of the letters. Some of the forfeda (the last group) changed meanings over the course of time, so I’ve included both. (I haven’t included pronunciations for the forfeda, though, mostly because none of my source materials did and I didn’t want to assign incorrect values.)
Per Dan Hanks’ request, here’s a Greek alphabet chart (in PDF):
(Classical Greek, that is, not modern Greek.)
Continuing with the language chart nerdiness, here’s a chart of Welsh mutations (in Welsh, the initial consonant of a word can change based on what comes before it):
Thanks to Kjerste Christensen for feedback on the chart.
After I made those Book of Mormon word frequency charts, I got to wondering about other books and what their charts would look like. So I made charts for all of Jane Austen’s novels and for Jane Eyre. Here’s the first page of the chart for Pride & Prejudice:
Because I’m a language nerd who loves the Book of Mormon, I’ve put together a few charts showing the top 400 words by frequency in the Book of Mormon in Spanish, French, German, and Italian.
(There are two pages, which is why you only see 150 words here.)
For each language I downloaded the text from scriptures.lds.org and removed the HTML tags, then ran a modified version of my friend Chad’s text cleaner script to get a sorted list of the words by frequency (lowercased so I wouldn’t get duplicate words). I then recapitalized the words (proper names for all four languages, and with German I also capitalized the nouns as they’re used in the text) and put it all into InDesign.
My rule of thumb was that I want this to show the words as they appear in the text, so I haven’t consolidated variant forms, and in French I’ve kept the elided articles separate. Basically, if you want to read the Book of Mormon in any of these languages, these lists will show you what words appear and the forms they appear in.
I’m passingly familiar with these languages but I’m nowhere near fluent, so if any of you happen to spot errors, let me know.
The other day I was looking through one of the directories on my computer and found a web-based family descendancy chart redesign that I forgot to post about. It’s a work in progress, but you can take a look at the live demo, which looks like this:
Traditional family group records (at least the ones I’m used to) are usually a little ugly, but man, they don’t have to be. Here are a couple of redesigns I’ve been playing around with (and you can click on the screenshots to get a full PDF of each).
I should add that they normally don’t look quite this bad — this happens to be printed from the new FamilySearch website, and the print stylesheets need a bit of work. But this is the general layout of traditional family group records.
Too many lines. And lots of wasted space on information that isn’t present. (If you intend to fill it out as a form later, however, then it’s a good thing. For the purposes of this redesign, I’m assuming you’re doing your data entry on the computer.)
Also, the visual hierarchy is essentially flat, making it hard to see the names of the people involved.
I see these as initial explorations into the area of family group record design — there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I’ve got lots of other ideas for ways to visualize family history data.
Anyway, feedback is welcome as usual.
Building on the pedigree charts I released about a year ago, I’ve made a handful of new charts. For the four-generation chart, I’ve added one that has three to a page. I’ve also added five-generation and six-generation charts for people who like to write small:
Beyond that, I’ve got something sort of new that I’m calling a family chart. It’s similar to the family pedigree I mentioned when I released Emperor — a pedigree chart meets family group sheet hybrid:
There’s also a tabular version for when you don’t care as much about the relationships between families (if you’re just trying to figure out which kids go with which parents, for example):
And last but not least, a timeline, for mapping out chronological relationships and that sort of thing:
While I do love software, it’s hard to beat paper for stuff like this — paper lets you be messy. I’m finding myself doing a lot of my genealogy research on paper for just that reason. It’s more flexible. I seriously, seriously love paper.