Sunday, December 8, 2002 - Sun, 8 Dec 2002

Developing a genealogy program is not all programming. There are many parallel tasks that must go on simultaneously. The most important of these is research. I am continuously on the lookout for new genealogical developments and innovations. For that reason I maintain my Genealogical Program Links Page and keep track of what all the hundreds of other programs out there are doing and their new features that they are implementing.

So today, I happened to find out about GeneaNet, a site that is trying to index all the genealogical resources, and has over 74 million entries in their database. I tried a few searches for my family names and places, and then found that they accept either GEDCOM or their own GeneaNet format. Thinking that it may be an important format for Behold to produce, I checked further. They list a whole number of Genealogy programs that export a GeneaNet file plus others that export GEDCOM. The GeneaNet site is based in France, and many of those programs it listed were French programs I hadn’t heard of. I went to some of their sites to check them out (needing to use Babelfish at Altavista or Google for translation), and added some of them to my Genealogical Program Links. They led to other pages, and along the way I found about 3 French link pages that listed maybe two dozen other French programs. Yikes! I can’t list all of them. So I added links to these link pages and left it at that for now.

One interesting discovery along the way was Ancestrologie. Here is a free Open Source full-featured genealogy program written in Delphi. It has a very handsome user interface, and seems to have the regular host of features most people require. It uses Delphi’s Interbase as its database, which does add a lot of overhead to the package. They seems to have some fairly talented programmers working on it as there are some of the features are interesting and well-done. They also use some third-party tools that I had previously looked at and considered.

But still, of the hundreds of programs out there, they all still have that modal fill-in-the-blanks input form, and a one-at-a-time see the individual way of viewing the data. I better keep working on Behold. It is needed!