* re Build a Better

[PaulDesmondWhite]

Too often standards lag behind the “really useful” developments, so I don’t hold out much hope for this initiative (though I wish it well).
The best I can hope for is that some enterprising genealogy program author might take the bull by the horns and gamble on a proprietary extension.
FH and several other programs make quite a good job of the core requirement which is to provide an intuitive user interface for the display, editing and reporting of data. The same could be done for extensions, where the actual data storage format is of much less importance until the interface gains wider support.
The kinds of thing I’d like to see include:
•      A new “object type”, to supplement Individual and Family, called Household. This would model census-type snapshots, allow once-only entry of time and place data, capture all the individuals’ details including stated relationships and partnership details (years married, total and surviving offspring). The relationships would be validated against the Family structure and flagged as inconsistent, where appropriate. New Individual “facts” to cover census name, age, occupation, birthplace. Report/chart options to include all these. New chart type showing all persons in non-familial relationships to the selected individual. Geo-tag for each address. Hints plus manual confirmation of successive addresses’ identity. Automatic generation of “moved” events.
•      A new “fact” for BMD registrations. Separate sub-types for Index entry and full details. All the usual data including stated names, with RD/SD look-up, relationships (informant, witness) and addresses.
•      A new “persona” object type, mainly for One-Name Studies but of some use anyway, which can replace Individual as the primary link to BMD and census records. Would have the full complement of individual-type facts plus (multiple, with optional confidence rating) identification with Individuals. A validation and reporting capability to warn if census/BMD records have been allocated to more than one Individual and show which records have not yet been assigned.
I don’t pretend the above is exhaustive for the type of work I do or the way I go about it, and others may well do things differently and have other priorities. All I can say is that until FH (or FTM, etc) can do most of this I will have to do all the hard stuff with Access and Excel.
Just to round things off, a big moan about ancestry web sites. Apart from FreeBMD, I’m not aware of any which allows you to download structured data records. That really stinks.

ID:4864

[jmurphy]

Paul -- just a couple of quick points.

For sorting out evidence before you have come to a conclusion, in addition to keeping notes in programs like Excel, you may want to look at Lineascope:

http://www.lineascope.com/

For your comment on downloading structured data sets -- some search results can be downloaded from the website of the US National Archives' AAD (Access to Archival Databases) site.

http://aad.archives.gov/aad/

For instance, for the collection Germans to America Passenger Data File, 1850 - 1897 for results fewer than 1,000 entries the results can be sorted and / or downloaded. The resulting CSV files can easily be imported into Excel.