genealogy-brainstorming

Genealogy Brainstorming

Contributors

• Andy Mabbett

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.

Document types

Genealogy documents on the web tend to fall into one of several types:

• A family tree with many members (e.g. [1]).
• A page for an individual, listing their ancestors and descendants for one generation in each direction, plus their spouse(s) and, sometimes, their sibling(s) (e.g. [2], [3]).
• As above, but for a couple (e.g. [4])
• Prose pages which may discuss the families of one or more, sometimes unrelated, individuals (not necessarily in the context of genealogy) (e.g. [5]).

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 some family rel values: "parent", "child", "sibling", "spouse".

Although, from existing publishing practices, it seems likely that the above ("primary") relationships 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