What Do You Want _TODO? - Sun, 9 Nov 2014

With the talk of a new GEDCOM standard, and my talk about the old GEDCOM standard, one item not yet considered has been To Do lists.

Many genealogists seems to want some sort of method of tracking their goals and the information they plan to find. They feel that keeping track of what they want to accomplish will help them do their research. They want their genealogy software to record this for them. They expect that their program will provide the means they need to keep them focused and on track.

Well, that’s what’s supposed to happen in theory, but it doesn’t seem to always work that way in practise. I’ve researched methods of planning for project management and managerial duties and I’ve looked a various ways to simply keep myself or any person organized and not forget what’s needed to be done. Ideally there should be one scheme that should work right from the big projects down to the simple tasks. Take a look at my past post about Getting Things Done and my next post about Fixing Getting Things Done. I concluded by saying that I thought I had the model to implement a simple but useful To Do list into genealogy software.

That was over 5 years ago. Since then I learned a few things. I found that for me, nothing more complicated than keeping a simple list of things to do worked. Every method other than that worked for a week or a month and then got abandoned for the plain old reliable list. All I really needed to do was make accessing and updating that list simple, and my smart phone turned out to just be perfect for that.

That’s all you need if you only have a few things to do, a simple list. But once your list starts to grow and you have more than 10 or 20 items, it starts to become unwieldy. So you have to divide and conquer and place your items into categories.

What should the categories be? That’s actually obvious when you think about it. You need to subdivide by WHERE you will be doing the task. That way, when you are somewhere, you will have the list of what needs to be done there. People normally segregate this way, and place all the items they’ll buy at their supermarket on a grocery list. All the material needed to build the shed in a corner of the backyard. All the clothes to be washed in a closet. All the items to do on your computer in a huge pile on your desk. And all the items you want to research about your family at a particular website together in one list waiting for when you have some research time for that website.

You do do that last item, don’t you? I’m amazed at how many people don’t. Instead, they organize by person.

Let’s say you want to find your g-g-grandfather’s birth certificate, and his brother’s wife’s name, and their son’s wedding information, and your great-uncle’s immigration record. Let’s write down every other thing we want to find about every person.

Well that’s almost seems ridiculous to me. What you’re creating is a big list of all the things that you don’t know and need evidence for. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing genealogy, you’re are always going to have people you need information about. Even if you know 10 generations back, then you don’t know the 11th. And in-between there is always a lot of information you are unsure of.

So let’s just list every unknown fact for 4,000 people in your tree and put those 20,000 items in a To Do list. That should really help, shouldn’t it?

Bleachh!! This is what most genealogy software that allows adding To Do notes by person is telling us to do. It’s totally the wrong way to do this.

What must be done is to organize your To Dos by where you want to do it. You may know of some records might be at your local archive. There may be some vital statistics you have to write away for at the state office. You may have some information you need to get from Aunt Helen. There may be some online searches you want to do at your computer at a particular website when you have time to do it thoroughly. Or you may want to make a trip to your grandparent’s village and take in everything possible.

It is now clear. Divide and conquer by where the task needs to be done. Attach your To Dos to the WHERE.

In GEDCOM terms, the “where” are the the locations that hold the information sources you are looking for. These are known as the repositories, that are recorded as the REPO record in GEDCOM. Every source has a REPO that you got it from. Every REPO is linked to by all the sources you got from it.

I say the proper means is to attach your To Dos to the repository you will do it at. When you go to that repository, be it the local archive, Aunt May, or the online website, you’ll have the list in front of you what you want to do there. This, in a nutshell, what you need to do to be organized and efficient.

Okay, now I’ll get off my soapbox and just look at what some programs do. I’m not actually going to look at the programs themselves, but I’m going to look at how they export their To Do data into GEDCOM. This gives a good idea of the thinking behind these programs.

First of all, GEDCOM never included any capability to store your objectives, goals, tasks or To Dos. Many developers added this capability to their genealogy software, and then found no official way to export it into GEDCOM.

Some of them created an _TODO tag. This is a user-defined in GEDCOM, with a leading underscore on the tag name. The term “user-defined” is a bit of an oxymoron, because it is the developer, not the user, who is defining this tag. None-the-less, let’s take a look at what they’ve done.

Among my 650 files, I have only 13 with _TODO tags in them. Most of them are from Legacy versions 5.0 and up.

Legacy typically exports its To Dos to GEDCOM that, in their most complex form, look like the following. The TODO tag is subordinate to a INDI record, so it is associated with a To Do for a specific person. Not all the level 2 tags shown below are included in all cases, so it looks like only fields the user fills in are exported:

0 @I1@ INDI
…
1 _TODO
2 DESC Request search for obituary in Paris newspaper
2 _CAT Obituary
2 _LOCL Paris, France
2 DATE Jul 1998
2 _CDATE 6 Aug 1998
2 STAT Completed
2 TYPE 1
2 PRTY 8
2 REPO @R12@
2 NOTE Request search for John’s obituary
2 DATA 6 Aug 1998 - received letter stating that the n
3 CONC ewspapers began publishing after John’s dea
3 CONC th so they were unable to search for an obituary

It’s pretty easy to figure out what each field means here. This really is not that bad an implementation. There’s a date, a completion date, a type that means something program specific, notes, and what I think is most important, a link to the Repository!

What is really sad is that the 13 GEDCOM files I have that use the _TODO tag use it only two or three times in the entire file. If this were something that really was set up in a useful way, you’d think people would use the feature much more. But they don’t seem to.

Displaying this information with the Repository would be useful. But Legacy likely only displays it by person, which IMO it’s pretty useless. This might explain why so few people seem to use the feature.

I have also seen similarly non-trivial implementations of the _TODO tag included in GEDCOMs produced by Ancestral Quest and RootsMagic and Family Origins (the predecessor to RootsMagic). It’s amazing how similar the four implementations look – and that’s not a bad thing, because it potentially allows the possibility to correctly transfer the To Do data between these programs.

I think it is useful for a future GEDCOM replacement to include this sort of information for the researcher. But one change must be made. The ToDo tag should be attached to the repository record and within it link to the person or people (if any) the To Do may be about. It should be of the form:

0 @R12@ REPO
…
1 _TODO
2 DESC Request search for obituary in Paris newspaper
2 _CAT Obituary
2 _LOCL Paris, France
2 DATE Jul 1998
2 _CDATE 6 Aug 1998
2 STAT Completed
2 TYPE 1
2 PRTY 8
2 INDI @I1@
2 NOTE Request search for John’s obituary
2 DATA 6 Aug 1998 - received letter stating that the n
3 CONC ewspapers began publishing after John’s dea
3 CONC th so they were unable to search for an obituary

Doing so would encourage developers to attach the To Do items to the Repository and display them with the Repository information. Then the information would be useful. If this information becomes useful, then people might actually start using it.