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Post by Henry on Dec 29, 2008 12:24:19 GMT -5
Dear Colleagues, I also have an interest in the most appropriate genealogy software that can be used for Chinese genealogy and I have not tried to input my Tan lineages into any software until I know more about the capabilities of the software to handle specific features that are pertinent to storing, querying, displaying and transferring the database version of my Tan lineages - I do not want to have to re-do all this inputting if I decide to switch to another software package. I believe Doug has wisely chose to initiate threads that are important features relevant for genealogy software to support Chinese genealogy such as: converting graphical Chinese images into typed Chinese characters, UNICODE - the standard for the digital representation of Chinese characters, and GEDCOM - the de facto transfer standard, and Doug has already noted a Wikipedia article comparing the features of genealogy software: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_genealogy_softwareI would like to add another three URLs that also have some comparisons for the features of genealogy software: genealogy-software-review.toptenreviews.com/rwilson.us/comparison.htmwww.genbox.com/comparison.htmHenry |
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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 2, 2009 21:31:25 GMT -5
Remember, (1) There are many free programs and you do not have to buy a program until you are so comfortable with the features that it becomes second nature to you. (2) Make sure the program supports Unicode. (3) Make sure the GEDCOM contains the information you put into the data entry fields. Nothing is more frustrating than losing data you have spent so long gathering and processing. With a high quality GEDCOM file, you can then upload the data into other genealogy program and explore their features rather than spend time inputing data again. An example is MyHeritage.com www.myheritage.com and its companion computer based Family Tree Builder www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder. MyHeritage.com displays Chinese characters, has Simplified and Traditional Chinese interface, but neither exports nor imports Unicode into nor out of both GEDCOM nor the Family Tree Builder program. Doug |
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Post by philiptancl on Jan 8, 2009 7:52:58 GMT -5
I use the free genealogy-related social networking website geni.com as a collaborative tool that allows me and other family members to build up a common family tree and history. My 1st cousin once removed in US was the tree creator on March 13, 2008. Relatives added to the tree can join Geni and they in turn can add other relatives, I was therefore invited and joined on March 17, 2008.
Initially I had compiled my family tree from my grandfather downwards using a spreadsheets; more as a record for the benefit of my children, nephews and nieces as I was about the only one that seems interested among less than a handful of Chen (陈/陳) cousins from my generation that are left.
I visited my ancestral village in Fujian on August 2007 for the first time. While there I was handed a set of my Chen (陈/陳) clan zupu from which I could trace my family tree all the way to Huangdi. As Geni.com provides for families to work together to build up profiles of common ancestors, I inputted whatever information I had collected in the spreadsheets and my pedigree lineage from the zupu into Geni. With Geni everyone in the tree has a profile which shows more about them and it also enables other family members to stay in touch with each other. Only the people in your family tree can log in to your tree and your profile. Each profile allows the following details and other activities:
1. Name and Surname both in English and as well as in Chinese characters,
2. Display name both in English and as well as in Chinese characters (I use this also to display the generation name as well as the generation level),
3. Email (if you enter the email of a profile an invitation would be send to the person to join),
4. Timezone,
5. Current location,
6. Gender,
7. Date of birth,
8. Whether to send reminder to other family members regarding your birthday and anniversaries,
9. Place of birth,
10. Birth order,
11. Date and place of death,
12. Date of funeral,
13. Date and place of burial,
14. Anything regarding the person in that profile,
15. Personal information,
16. Contact information,
17. Work information,
18. Schooling information,
19. Add events in person timeline,
20. Family timeline showing everyone in the family,
21. Post links,
22. Download a photo or jpg file for the profile,
23. Family members can share photos, videos and events,
24. Post discussions among family members, and
25. Post news for other family members.
As the zupu is in Chinese and as I do not know how to use any Chinese software to write out the Chinese characters of my ancestors, I was fortunate to locate the free Nciku.com website to do so; using the computer mouse to imitate the strokes in whatever sequence I like. I find this very easy to use. After the correct character is selected, you can search for that character within the website and from that most of the following are provided:
1. The simplified and traditional Chinese character (if any) of the character,
2. The pinyin writing of the character,
3. Provide you the audio of how to say the word in Mandarin,
4. Illustrate the sequence of writing the character,
5. Various meaning of the character,
6. How the character could be used in a sentence.
Therefore with Geni.com and Nciku.com I was thus able to build up my family tree and each profile using whatever languages (English or Chinese) or mixed of languages (English and/or Chinese) I please. Geni allows you to include siblings, spouses, aunts and uncles, in-laws and their families. When you have added the relatives, there is an option to add their email addresses and have the tree sent to them. They in turn could add their own data and they can expand upon the tree. As such all families can work together to build profiles for common ancestors.
I understand users can import their family history into Geni using the GEDCOM format. I also understand users can export a GEDCOM of their family tree from Geni. I am neither able nor tried any of these functions and as such I do not know whether these functions could be done with Chinese characters.
Geni.com was launched in January 2007 by it founder David Sacks who said that he wants to create a single family tree for the whole world! As of today it has over 40 millions profiles.
As to the tree in Geni (which I belong to) already has over 2,200 profiles consisting of my family group and my family’s family. There are huge number of more profiles from my zupu and my wife’s zupu that I could be inputted in but I lack the time to do so in the meantime. Whilst Geni founder wants to create a single family tree for the whole world, mine is more modest. My dream is to connect as many Chen (陈/陳) into the tree as it is being developed and hopefully with other surnames as well. Are there any takers for those who can connect their tree somewhere to mine?
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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 8, 2009 14:36:36 GMT -5
Dear Phillip, That was a very informative and useful post on Geni.com www.geni.com . I use Dynastree www.dynastree.com and do not want to appear as if I were advocating one particular on-line family tree/social network product over another. I use my program in the same way you use yours. A tree with over 2000 profiles is a good size family tree. From your description on prior posts, I know you tree is both deep (several generations in the past) and broad (several cousins removed). It sounds like Geni.com can display Chinese characters, which is a critical criterion for exploring Chinese genealogy. You mentioned how daunting it is to maintain so many names. Despite presumed security issues of being on the Internet, having other families maintain their own ‘nodes’ is one of the best feature of using the Wide World Web. This allows expansion of your family tree (increased breadth of the tree) without increasing your workload. The downside is loss of control over content and format display in that ‘node’. I just have to swallow hard, take a deep breath, and let people ‘do their thing’. I think Geni.com describes this as people owning their own ‘forest’. Your description of your use of Nciku.com www.nciku.com/ sounds easier than the program I have used www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html since there are less steps siyigenealogy.proboards28.com/index.cgi?board=software&action=display&thread=851 and it is less sensitive to the stroke order www.zhongwen.com/shufa/index.html . I will give Nciku.com a try next time. I plan to re-upload my archival GEDCOM and play around with Geni.com again. I also need to study how well it exports back to GEDCOM. Thanks for taking time off your busy schedule for posting in this forum. Doug |
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Post by Ah Gin on Jan 31, 2009 14:42:06 GMT -5
Doug et al,
I have also started on Geni. Feels good and fairly simple to use. Our little bush is just growing. I have yet to do a cut and paste and enter in Chinese. Currently it's still all in English. It's a pleasant surprise to see relatives interested in tracing their roots. More later, when I have gained more experience with this software.
Regards, Ah Gin
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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 31, 2009 15:31:03 GMT -5
Dear Ah Gin,
I am looking forward to hearing more about your experience. They have a very active forum with lots of ideas and tips.
Let us know how the Chinese is displayed. I hear it works well.
Doug
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Post by Ah Gin on Feb 2, 2009 3:23:45 GMT -5
Doug,
I have now a better feel for Geni, and have little else to add to Phillip's detailed posting. Easy to use and impressive results. Added Chinese by way of Cut & Paste from an existing Word Doc. Imported jpeg photos etc. At some stage I will export the list, which I presume will look like an excel spreadsheet or a simple list (Phillip can you comment?)
I have started a "Discussion" and a "News" section, all available to our Family Cluster. Will be interesting to see if our family members start to join in the family discussion.
Re: forum on Geni. Before I go looking for this, do you happen to have the URL?
Regards, Ah Gin
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Post by kerry on Feb 2, 2009 5:01:34 GMT -5
Geni.com was launched in January 2007 by it founder David Sacks who said that he wants to create a single family tree for the whole world! As of today it has over 40 millions profiles. One of the problems with the "one tree" model is that the contributors put in isn't necessarily "homogenous". I've seen plenty of trees where there are "matches" which implies we could "join" our trees together. But the devil is in the detail. Some sites will put in any details they can get, others would only post confirmed research. Would you want to be linked at a point where you disagreed with the other persons analysis? I don't allow pure speculations on my web tree because I don't want to mislead others. Another point. From their FAQs I don't want another "free" account so I didn't find out what the costs are. The free account seems to have some limitations around size of the download GEDCOM. This is critical - it's your data and if you can't get a clean backup, you have a big problem. There was a forum post on their site about the problem of name order for Chinese and other Asian genealogies. I would be interested to see if they can come up with a solution for this but the lack of discussion on their forum about how this needs to work (and it is NOT a simple fix) and the broken nature of the Chinese characters sections of the Directory does not fill me with hope. The blog tells me a bit more about how they work. The "gifts" thing seems a bit gimicky to me - if your not interested in genealogy, will shopping vouchers for Blockbuster change my mind? well, actually not for me - I don't live in the continental US. Please don't think I'm a wet blanket - this site will work for some. I'm just saying why it wouldn't work for me. |
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Post by Doug 周 on Feb 5, 2009 18:28:57 GMT -5
Posted by ahgin on Feb 2, 2009, 12:23am Here is the URL: forum.geni.com/Everyone has different needs and different abilities. Kerry works in the Information Technology field and uses the program PhpGedView, which allows great control over the content and presentation. Being an 'open source program', the program is essentially 'owned' by the Web master. Kerry's site: www.kerrychoy.id.au/phpGedView/index.php?logout=1&changelanguage=yes&NEWLANGUAGE=englishYou can request an invitation to explore his site. PhpGedView requires purchasing or renting a server web site, knowing something about Apache protocol and using MySQL databases. You configure and design the main page yourself. Hopefully Kerry can write something about his experience in setting up PhpGedView. This will help forum readers decide if they want to own and operate their own PhpGedView web site. Here is their Wiki: wiki.phpgedview.net/en/index.php?title=Main_PageRegardless of which route you may choose, I want to reiterate you first get the Chinese characters into your program as Chinese text, and then you export your data into a GEDCOM to save on your hard drive. With an accurate GEDCOM, you can upload your data to another program and benefit from what these programs have to offer. Please, everyone, when you try these programs, share your experience on the forum so others can benefit. There are just too many programs for people to use. Doug |
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Post by Henry on Feb 5, 2009 18:51:45 GMT -5
Dear Colleagues, I would also like to strongly support Doug's previous note on using "COCR2" program to capture Chinese characters as they appear as images and convert them into Chinese characters that can be searched and stored in files, genealogy programs & databases. Philip Tan tried this program and just loves it! This is what Doug had suggested trying: " Another way to get Chinese characters is with OCR. OCR is an acronym for Optical Character Recognition. It will look at a picture of your Chinese character and offer possible Chinese text (as Unicode). Your scanned image of the Chinese character file needs to be a bitmap (.bmp) file. You identify the character you want to import as Chinese text. From there you choose from 9 possibilities. users.belgacom.net/chardic/cocr2.html . This is Windows OS freeware. It has the problems with hand written characters since penmanship becomes an issue. BTW a Windows OS freeware to scan images or convert them to a bitmap format is Irfanview. www.irfanview.com/ " Henry |
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Post by Doug 周 on Feb 6, 2009 12:13:34 GMT -5
Another point for discussion: The on-line sites make some attempt to search other trees and provide possible connections. On MyHeritage.com, I was offered several matches with with trees, with varying quality of matching. Of the 6 matches offered, I found two relatives who also had trees on MyHeritage, and contacted them to network to my family tree. Here is a sticky note about the cost of Geni: forum.geni.com/topic.php?id=34331FYI-Doug |
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Post by sjouke on Mar 1, 2009 4:02:05 GMT -5
Hi all, You might take a look at Genmod, which is an open source genealogy program that has support for chinese gedcoms. Specific chinese related features are automatic chinese to pinyin translation and mixed soundex search ("tan" will also find Ì·£©. The software can be found at sourceforge.net/projects/genmodMore info on www.genmod.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=98As I'm the main developer of the software, it's possible to extend these features. It would be nice to cooperate with some users, as I cannot read or write chinese myself (my wife can but she's not into genealogy). Boudewijn |
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Post by Ah Gin on Feb 23, 2010 5:05:11 GMT -5
Doug et al,
Using Geni, having generated a tree, how can I "export" each branch of the tree, or the entire tree, so that I can paste the tree or branch into a Word document? Else, when I am documenting my Jiapu, I will have to print views of an extensive tree and physically include the tree or branches?
Regards, Ah Gin
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Post by Doug 周 on Feb 25, 2010 14:26:52 GMT -5
I don't use Geni much, although I do have an account. When I checked, there is a function which allows printing onto paper or PDF. Ahgin, please describe for the forum members what you are trying to do. I assume that you are wanting to print onto paper a Jiapu/Zupu for archival purpose. Each program allows certain features for printing. Tell us what features you want on your printed Jiapu, and why, and if Geni is able to provide those features. I used to use Dynastree. Unfortunately they closed shop this February and merged the information to Myheritage.com.  As per my previous posts, I have used this particular site to export a GEDCOM file for archival and transferring the data to other software program, so I have several time intervals of GEDCOM files on my computer. I will write later about what happened to Dynastree and again emphasize you use these programs to generate a good quality GEDCOM file for your archival purpose. I had liked Dynastree for the high quality GEDCOM they exported. Their printing function did not allow for Chinese characters. All this now is moot. Of course Ahgin is using paper for his archival purpose, which is another way to back up your Jiapu. Doug |
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Post by Ah Gin on Feb 25, 2010 15:26:22 GMT -5
Doug,
Thanks for responding to my call for advice.
I have updated my Jiapu/Zupu, using MSWord. Now I wish to insert the family tree/branches (created under Geni) at the relevent MS Word pages.
From Geni I can print the relevant tree/branches on paper, and that's fine. However, if I wish to insert the Branches into MS Word, so that I can preserve the pagination, numbering etc. what is the best way? I have tried to use my printer's feature "Print to file", managed to save the file, but not able to open the file in MS Word (as I suspect it's a special file requiring an application to open). I have not used the PDF option yet, as I have an old version of PDF and reluctant to get yet another version.
So any help will be great.
Regards, Ah Gin
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As per my previous posts, I have used this particular site to export a GEDCOM file for archival and transferring the data to other software program, so I have several time intervals of GEDCOM files on my computer.