Re: Genealogy For The Beginner

Haines Brown wrote:
> Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> 
>> One of the problems with data display in modern genealogy programs is
>> that there is usually no way to communicate fuzzy truth.  In Legacy, I
>> can assign a confidence level to a source for a particular datum, but
>> unless someone digs down into the innards of my data and looks at that
>> confidence level, they'll never see it - it doesn't figure into any of
>> the displays or re****ts above the obscure footnote level that in fact
>> probably nobody will ever read, including me.  So I never bother
>> filling it in.
> 
> Very interesting. What you are saying is that a print (printed page or
> on a browser) cannot accurately reflect the reality of the lineage with
> all its uncertainties. Normally when one prints something, what is
> printed is static, unambivalent. Is it possible to print uncertainty? A
> conventional way might be to use a dotted line rather than a solid line,
> or lines with different colors, although that would be unconventional
> and would require the display of a color key to indicate degrees of
> uncertainty.

The root problem here is that the traditional genealogical presentation 
standards were devised to present certainties.  A do***ent was likely to 
be used to illustrate a patron's descent from a notable ancestor.  The 
patron wouldn't be pleased to have a representation that showed it 
wasn't clear that he was so descended.  If we want to show finer nuances 
we need to devise alternative representations.

One approach I've used to summarise a lot of information has been to 
draw boxes to represent families with links from the child of one family 
to the parent of the next generation.  Where it's not clear which child 
in the earlier generation was the parent in the next I could draw links 
to each alternative.  It would be perfectly possible to annotate such a 
link with one's thoughts about its probability.

In practical terms I used (or misused!) Enterprise Architect, a UML 
package for this, largely because it was to hand.  The families were 
represented by class symbols with the parents' names as the class title 
and childrens' names (and DoB) as attribute names.  As EA allows a link 
to be pinned to a specific point on the symbol's boundary I could ensure 
that a link was adjacent to the correct child.  EA allows notes to be 
added to the links - and to the families themselves.  As an added 
refinement EA could be persuaded to allow symbols from different diagram 
types; I used the Synch symbol from the state diagram palette to handle 
the situation where I had two children of the same name on one 
generation and two fathers of the same name in the next but no 
information as to which was which.

Such a diagram is, of course, static but could be revised as one's views 
changed with additional information.

-- 
Ian

Hotmail is for spammers.  Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk