genealogy-brainstorming
Genealogy Brainstorming
Contributors
Building blocks
Since genealogy is about people and their relationships, it is likely that any genealogical microformat will be built from hCard and XFN microformats; with hCalendar used for dates such as marriages and divorces.
Gender
To make life easier for publishers, the following values could all equate, without requiring the use of abbr to:
Male
- male
- he
- man
- m
- son
- father
- husband
- brother
- uncle
- nephew
- grandfather/ grand-father / great-grand-father etc.
- grandson/ grand-son / great-grand-son etc.
- ...
Female
- female
- she
- woman
- f
- fem
- wife
- daughter
- mother
- sister
- aunt
- niece
- grandmother/ grand-mother / great-grand-mother etc.
- granddaughter/ grand-daughter / great-grand-daughter etc.
- ...
Issue
- What about other languages?
- See: internationalisation
- Gender reassignment and other edge cases
- Outside the 80/20 cut-off
- Could use
abbr
Relationships
XFN has family rel values.
Although, from existing publishing practices, it seems likely that primary relationships ("parent", "child", "sibling", "spouse") are more commonly expressed than secondary relationships ("aunt", "grand-father") when linking from one page to another, additional values may be required (see above for further examples). These could, of course, be used outside a genealogy microformat, as with other XFN values.
Non-marriage partnerships and short-term liaisons should also be catered for (for the parents of illegitimate children).
In addition to the gender-neutral primary relationships already in XFN, gender-specific terms may be required ("father" and "mother" for "parent", for example). There might also be a need for "step-sibling", "step-mother" and "half-sibling", etc.
See also: xfn-brainstorming#Extending_family_relationships
Date of death
Inevitably, more of our ancestors are dead than alive.
Since non-genealogical web pages also publish death dates, it is proposed that hCard be extended to incorporate them. See hcard-date-of-death
Date of baptism
Older records, from times when registration of births was not carried out, rely on baptism records, A date-of-baptism property is thus required. This could be added to hCard, or be specific to a genealogy microformat, and should be based on hCards "bday".
See also
- genealogy - overview of genealogy microformat effort
- genealogy-examples - research and documentation of existing real world genealogy publishing examples on the web
- genealogy-formats - research and documentation of previous genealogy related formats
- genealogy-brainstorming - brainstorm proposals for a genealogy microformat