The past days ancestors have been part of our conversation at home, as it is part of Y’s current work at school. We started with the concept of being named after someone. Some time ago from her grandmother, the namesake of her second name, she received a set of multiple ‘birth spoons‘, marked with the initials and dates of those who carried the same name. Y is not just named after her maternal grandmother, but she was too, and her maternal grandmother was too. The line stretches back 6 generations to 1817 that way. Y and I followed the trail in the open online archives, and found out that the line actually stretches to one more maternal grandmother as namesake, which gets us to 8 generations and the mid 1700s.
The question where my first name came from brought us to my maternal grandfather, his great uncle, and his godfather.

By then I had quite a bit of information jotted down, and wondered about storing and structuring, or visualising it in some way. As could be expected there is a machine readable data format for genealogical data, GEDCOM. It was created in the 1980s by the Mormon church, for whom tracking genealogy is connected to some of their core beliefs. As such the data format is heavily centered on nuclear families as opposed to individuals and their lineage. GEDCOM is flat text which promises that it can be read by self created parsers. Searching for a genealogical software tool to make data entry easy, there’s no shortage of paid-for online services, and there’s of course the Mormon run FamilySearch. Local software all looks and feels as if it is 20 years or more old. There isn’t much that is FOSS and can run on a present day Mac. I settled on using GRAMPS, a FOSS project originating in 2001, but with the latest release November last year, and available for Mac too. It’s written in Python, uses a database, and exports in GEDCOM and XML, and it seems to have an API too.

I entered the information I already collected, and then started adding from the open online archives. My father in the early 1990s researched mostly paternal lines. Pre-digitally that was somewhat logical and easier. Historic documents are mostly focused on men, and branching families meant having to visit multiple church and civic archives adding quite a lot to the workload. Online archives offer search over transcribed archive documents, and cover the entire country.

It still costs time, but over the course of a few days I’ve been able to identify all of Y’s ancestors 6 generations deep (early 1800s, 64 ancestors in the 6th generation), and partly up to 9 generations deep (512 ancestors). This allows looking back some 300 years to the early 1700s, and in a few rare cases to the 1650s.

The GRAMPS software provided this visualisation of Y’s ancestors as a wheel around her. Y is at the center, each ring reaches another generation back. The light blue ring is the last fully complete one, beyond that I haven’t searched for everything yet, and not everything is available online either. First names of living persons removed.