ThinkGenealogy

Soon after posting the Genealogy Research Process map, I was contacted by Bob Coret about translating it into Dutch.  Bob took charge of the entire effort and enlisted the help of the Family Tree Forum (Stamboom Forum).  With the help of about 8 volunteers the map was translated, reviewed, and corrected.  My part of the project was easy as I simply copied and pasted the translations and as needed reduced the font size to fit the longer words.  The team did an excellent job and I want to congratulate them for their efforts.  I hope the translated map will be very useful to you for many years.

downloadable PDF (Dutch) - 8.1 MB

Earlier this week, Drew Smith and George G. Morgan (The Genealogy Guys) spent 9 minutes of their podcast discussing the Genealogy Research Process map.  Their discussion starts about 26 minutes into the podcast.  I am a long time listener of The Genealogy Guys and am pleased that they are spreading the word about the map.  Both George and Drew were very kind in their remarks about this visualization based on the work of The Board For Certification of Genealogists and Elizabeth Shown Mills.

There have been some requests to provide the Genealogy Research Process map in a format for use as desktop wallpaper.  Here are both widescreen and fullscreen resolutions:

 Widescreen

• 1920 x 1200 (2 MB)
• 1680 x 1050 (797 KB)
• 1440 x 900 (608 KB)
• 1280 x 800 (465 KB)

Fullscreen

• 1920 x 1440 (2 MB)
• 1600 x 1200 (790 KB)
• 1280 x 1024 (612 KB)
• 1280 x 960 (530 KB)
• 1024 x 768 (369 KB)

The Genealogy Research Map (downloadable PDF - 11.4 MB) combines the concepts found in The Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) from the Board for Certification of Genealogists and the many works of Elizabeth Shown Mills into a single visualization.  It is my hope that others will find this map useful as a learning tool or reference. 

For those interested in a format for use as desktop wallpaper, follow this link.

What started out as a sample application to showcase the latest UI technology from Microsoft called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) resulted in a sample to the genealogy community of innovation.

At the beginning of this year, the company I work for hired Vertigo Software to do a prototype application using WPF.  Part of the portfolio that Vertigo shared with us during the pre-hiring phase was an end-to-end reference sample that they did for Microsoft. The exciting thing about this sample is that it is a genealogy application. Family.Show version 1 was released in April in preparation for the MIX 07 conference and version 2 was released in July.

This is not a full-fledged application and it wasn’t designed by experts in the genealogy community. But don’t dismiss it too quickly. This sample shows the imagination and innovation that can come when user interaction experts, software developers, and graphics designers work together. I especially like the different visualizations used in the application and will talk about them specifically in a future post.

Here is the feature list published by Vertigo:

• Quickly build your family tree
• Add photos easily via drag-and-drop
• Create advanced family tree visualizations with pan and zoom support
• See what your family tree looked like years ago using the Time Explorer
• Tell your family members’ story using rich editing and formatting controls
• Mine your family data with statistical filtering and sorting
• Import and export family trees to GEDCOM 5.5, a standard genealogy format
• Change the look of the entire application by choosing a different skin

Some limitations of the application are:

• Supports single birth, marriage, and death events
• No other events supported
• Doesn’t support approximate dates (Abt. 1815, Bet. Jan 1707/08 - Jan 1708/09, Bef. 1931)

Links:

• For those who want to see screen shots/videos or who want to install it, go to the Vertigo Family.Show site.
• For software developers who want access to the source code, go to the CodePlex site.