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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 2, 2009 21:07:24 GMT -5
I feel it is important to have your family tree or Zupu 族谱 as a GEDCOM residing on your hard drive in your home computer. As mentioned before, the standards are loose, but there are standards. The most important thing is to make sure all the information you want to record gets into your GEDCOM. If you own a GEDCOM with Chinese characters, please share your experience in how you generated this. If you want to make your own GEDCOM, please note that so far there are no programs that will allow you to ‘graft’ someone else’s GEDCOM to a branch of your family tree. Even though graphically the family tree looks like a plant with branches and roots, the act of merging or grafting two or more GEDCOM’s is very difficult and risk ruining the integrity of both trees. I know of only one site www.geni.com where you can ‘prune’ (but not graft) a GEDCOM branch. However, I have no experience with this feature. For those who want to make their own GEDCOM, I recommend www.dynastree.com The quality of data in the GEDCOM output is very high and the site is free. You can export to your GEDCOM file as many times as you desire. Of course it supports Unicode. The Zupu 族谱 family tree must be centered on you as the main person. If you make a mistake, open a new account and start all over. Again, it is free. Be aware, you need a unique email address to open another account. Obtain supplemental email addresses from your Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail accounts and merely start all over. Until you have a pretty stable family tree, do not invite the email addresses of other relatives to participate in your tree since if you make a mistake, you will have to re-invite these relatives to a new family tree account and this confuses them and yourself with multiple trees accounts. If you prefer your own computer based software program, I like PhpGedView. wiki.phpgedview.net/en/index.php?title=Main_Page Again the GEDCOM export is very high quality and it supports Unicode. It is meant as a Web server based program but you can configure it to run on your computer. The configuration is difficult for most computer literate people. BTW: Dynastree has a free PC based program to display all your GEDCOM data on your home Windows PC but the synchronization with the web based tree is not complete. www.dynastree.com/infocentre/home-edition It is a version of the free Ahnenblatt www.ahnenblatt.com/ Once you have a GEDCOM Zupu 族谱, you can upload your file to virtually any program which supports Unicode. As mentioned in the post ‘What is GEDCOM?’ siyigenealogy.proboards28.com/index.cgi?board=software&action=display&thread=850 you might run into issues of all your data not transferring. However, the main focus of your Zupu 族谱 will be there. This gives you the freedom of exploring other web sites and other Genealogy programs. Hint: As you write the surnames, do as China did in the Beijing 2008 Olympics and capitalize all the letters. It makes it easier to get the names correct. Please post your first hand experience, either in the forum or private email. Doug
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Post by jefferyseow on Jan 6, 2009 10:39:37 GMT -5
I have merged gedcoms before using the old ancestry.exe application. I note that it is no longer available for free download or even for paid download anymore so I am taking good care of my hard drive and the program cos I don't think I'll find another quite like it. But yes, it is possible. Another thing I have also done with it apart from what I just mentioned is this. I enter gedcom A with ancestry, then I select the branch I want and create a gedcom of that branch. If there are more branches I want to use, I create gedcoms of those as well. Then I go into gedcom B and import all those gedcoms of branches from A. :-)
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Post by kerry on Jan 8, 2009 3:23:44 GMT -5
There is a component in PhpGedView with which you can merge two INDV records which should be the same person. That said, it's not for the faint hearted. Given the complexity with which records can be linked and different ways in which the data structures of GEDCOM can be used or misused, I'm not sure a "simple" algorithm exists to do this. Ultimately, the Mark I Eyeball is the safest way to merge precious data.
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Post by stephen on Jan 21, 2009 5:12:06 GMT -5
Can PhpGedView able to enter & view Chinese character?
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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 21, 2009 11:20:24 GMT -5
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Post by stephen on Jan 22, 2009 10:51:37 GMT -5
Dear Doug,
Thanks a lot. I also hope more people will show us more live examples.
Stephen
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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 22, 2009 11:30:40 GMT -5
Stephen, You can ask Kerry for an invitation to look at his program. He had let me into the site and has done an impressive job. It has much of the security people have written for an on-line genealogy site. For example, I am allowed to poke thru his structure but I cannot view any information on living people. The program I use, Dynastree, is not that flexible. You can flip into another language (Chinese) and continue to use the same database, unlike Ancestry.com's Chinese site www.jiapu.cn/Here is his web site to request an invitation: www.kerrychoy.id.au/phpGedView/index.php?logout=1&changelanguage=yes&NEWLANGUAGE=englishKerry makes his living in the Information Technology world. PhpGedView is meant as a on-line product to be placed on a server for the relatives far flung in the world to access. The protocols are too confusing for me. I use my version only as a local in-computer product and that was difficult to configure. I use it to maintain and correct errors in my GEDCOM. I also want familiarity with the program in case Dynastree shuts down. If you have the expertise, please go for it and share with us your experience. Doug
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Post by kerry on Jan 23, 2009 8:19:10 GMT -5
Some of the threads on this forum are starting to overlap so I'm going to try and narrow the scope on this particular thread to the question "why have the Zupu in GEDCOM". Discussions on what particular program to use is a different thread.
The reasoning is pretty much the same as computerising any task. Simple - small - one-off things lend themselves well to simple solutions. Most people use a post-it note for a writing a shopping list. But a thesis, a newspaper or form letters to a mailing list all lend themselves to automation.
Genealogy data is no different. If you only have 2 or 3 generations and absolutely no way of going anywhere else, a post-it note will do fine. Genealogy has structures and patterns that repeat and is pretty ideal to automation once there is any size to the body of data.
To the extent that a Zupu has a lot of data that conforms to the patterns that the GEDCOM standard, there is scope to "capture" most of the content of a Zupu electronically. It becomes easier to edit and update much as it is easier to update a thesis done on a word processor than it is to update one done on a typewriter.
Maybe the questions to asked is "do you or your clan want the Zupu to be easily available, updatable and distributable?" If any of the answers to these questions is "No" (too many black sheep; illegal immigration; family breakdowns;...) then you may not want the Zupu on GEDCOM.
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Post by Doug 周 on Jan 26, 2009 20:21:27 GMT -5
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Post by yuminnan on Mar 17, 2013 7:44:36 GMT -5
A question in this matter is also:
- Is there any software to create a Zupu / Jiapu? - Or is there a Word template to use?
If you have all the correct data in a GedCom file it would be nice if you could produce a book from it!
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Post by Doug 周 on Mar 17, 2013 10:47:02 GMT -5
yuminnan, There is software to print your GEDCOM. Classic Chinese family trees emphasize only the male and goes up the lineage to just one progenitor or originator of the clan. Ideally it would go up to Adam (some people actually claim that impossibility in their family tree) . More realistically it might go up to Huangdi. Western genealogy involves the male and female side of the family. Printing these charts can get rather extensive and will need a good index so people can navigate up, down, and crisscrossing their family tree. I have not personal experience with printing programs. Someone on the webtrees forum recommends this service: www.family-tree-factory.com/ . Also, Cyndi's list has information here: www.cyndislist.com/software/What software do you use for your zupu? Over the thousands of years of writing zupu's, the Chinese have perfected the printing of zupus with the proviso of a single male progenitor.
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Post by kerry on Mar 22, 2013 5:57:49 GMT -5
I've thought about Zupu formatted reports a bit and I think the answer is going to be "no", at least for the foreseeable future. Yes, GEDCOM format file would have the essential data you need and the structure of the data would allow for the Zupu data to be marshalled together. The problem really comes out the GEDCOM using program you use to enter data and format output. For those of us living outside of China, the majority of programs that we use are written in or for the US market, with the rest of the world as an afterthought. <Pauses to put on flameproof underwear...> The features which might not be present in any given program would include: - UTF-8 support for the data elements in the GEDCOM file
- Useful Chinese labelling in the user interface of the program (need to have native Chinese users on side in the first place)
- Convenient functionality to create single parent families
- Be able to create reports in top-to-bottom, right-to-left order.
When I compare these requirements with my personal tool of choice, Webtrees, I know it can handle the first one but I know that many of the commercial packages do not handle UTF-8 at all. The rest are not handled. (3rd point debatable but it is awkward.) Webtrees is a great program but it's strength is in the community of users/developers who also drive the direction. And as far as I know, all the current devs speak mainly English, French and German. What I suspect is that there is a community of Chinese folks who do genie stuff - we just can't talk to them. But I'll start another thread on this subject now....
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Post by Doug 周 on Apr 17, 2013 3:58:43 GMT -5
Kerry, Great points. The first two points are addressed by the current version of webtrees 1.4.1 which now has a simplified Chinese language interface. I am not sure what you mean by the 3rd point. Regarding the 4th point: I have been in contact with Dazupu.org. Henry had asked I look into this organization siyigenealogy.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=readings&thread=1795&page=1#11565As background, this is a Chinese organization that is gathering via GEDCOM family and clan trees from throughout China. They use PGV as their software engine (webtrees was developed from PGV). Regarding point #4 above, they have developed a PGV module to display the family tree charts in the standard top-to-bottom method as displayed in a classic Chinese Zupu. They have offered me the module, but I cannot code php and do not have the skills to transfer the module to webtrees. If you want to modify the module for webtrees, let me know and I will get it for you. There are Chinese services similar to Geni.com/ Myheritage.com which will host your family tree ( ouroots.nlc.gov.cn/, www.familypedia.cn/EN/Search.aspx, dazupu.org ). By using these services, remember that the magic number is 300. Most people can hand input 300 persons before they see the need to use GEDCOM to easily transfer larger profile family trees back and forth to other programs. Except for dazupu.org, I am not sure if the other two services allow import and export of GEDCOM.
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Post by kerry on May 6, 2013 21:59:25 GMT -5
Kerry, .... I am not sure what you mean by the 3rd point. This may have been fixed since I tried to do this last. Used to be awkward to create "fathers" without creating "mothers" as well. At one stage, I had to just go and delete some dud mothers that the system forced me to create. Looking at the UI of webtrees now, there appears to be a better approach in place now. I'm not a top-gun PHP coder but I have been able to mangle existing code and get it to apparently work. If you have a contact or can get a php file, please do and I'll have a go at it.
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