Family Historian User Group

Firstly, let me appologise if there is a discussion on this topic already, I have done a search of the forums but seem to have drawn a blank, which I do find a little surprising (is it a taboo suject?)

I want this post to be a bit of a discussion opener to talk about the way that Family Historian (probably through a plugin) could be used to accomplish at least a low level of integreation with Family Historian.

A bit of background... As many of you are probably aware, FamilySearch Family Tree is now available to members of the public. It is an online family tree, but, unlike the similar trees on ancestry.com and elsewhere, it is combined for everyone i.e. in theory an individual should appear only once and the community can change the tree wiki style - with sources backing up claims etc. Think of its ultimate (never obtainable) goal of being a single gedcom file with the whole of humanity within it, where anyone can contribute. Without going into the pros and cons of the idea, it is here and I for one want to at least keep up-to-date on my ancestors who appear in it. Note, if you are searching for this online, this if FamilySearch Family Tree (note, New Family Search (NFS) is now an old technology - the Family Tree replaces the NFS).

The big difference is that you do not download or upload gedcom files - familysearch has developed a whole developer API to search, change and query people. To develop for the API, you have to register as a developer and get clearance to access first the sandboxed site then acredited to use the production system. The API results are in the new gedcomx xml based syntax. It would be a huge amount of work to write a plugin to accomplish this. Is anyone working on such a thing already? Does anyone know if LUA has required libraries to accomplish such a task such as xml processing and OAuth?

I for one, want to keep a local copy of my family tree, but want to be able to at least easily track those individuals who appear in the FamilySearch Family Tree and any changes that are made. FamilySearch Family Tree uses a unique identifier (I believe similar to the Ancestral File Number). This could presumably be stored in the local gedcom file in the AFN, RFN, RIN or REFN gedcom fields. Does anyone know which would be the most correct?

A low tech solution would be a plugin that based on the reference number stored in your gedcom file opens a browser window to display the individual in family search (which includes last change dates etc). A more advance solution could query the API directly and look at last change dates etc to establish changes to individuals within your tree.

Another interesting aspect of the API is the authorities section, which has defined place names, dates and surname variants. I dont know how this works exactly but could be useful to implement.

Several of Family Historians competitor products already have integration built in to the FamilySearch Family Tree (FamilySearch have retired PAF in favour of these products). Even if Family Historian is working on proper integration in version 6, a low-tech plugin might be a solution for now.

So if anyone has any thoughts, suggestions, is/has worked on this already please let me know!

I did take a look and get registered to work with the API a while ago, but have not had the time to dig through the in's and out's. There are several XML libraries and a oAuth one so in theory it's possible. I just don't have the time to commit to writing anything at the moment.

It would be a useful discussion to know how many people might be interested in using it and what features they might want.

Just in case anyone is interested in this, I have registered with FamilySearch as a developer and done a bit of playing around with the api, put some code together and got something working (this is in good old fashioned c using the win32 api rather than lua at the moment but I also have code to read in gedcom so could still work with Family Historian). This is more of a prototype and proof of concept at the moment and I can then rewrite it into lua as a plugin.

I would be interested in other peoples ideas on what they might like to do in relation to the FamilySearch Family Tree and local gedcom files as if I am going to write a plugin for my own use, I would like to make it of use to others.

Just a quick thought, if you are writing in C I think it's fairly straight forward to build a dll for use in Lua (don't ask me how I only speak 5 main computer languages and C is not one of them.

From a usage point of view I would like to be able to do a quick search for existing people in my tree and get any possible matches and then mark them as useful, rubbish etc. Personally at the moment I would not want to upload my data to Family Search.