Introducing my new blog, gentechnica, that will be concerned with the technical side of genealogy. I will focus particularly on the use of computers in genealogical research and archiving. With so much of our family information and documents being stored digitally now, the safety and usefullness of this information is extremely important. Will your family history files still exist in 50 years? Will they be stored in a format that has become obsolete, like a gramophone disks or an 8-track recording. Despite the importance of these issues, they are rarely discussed in the mainstream genealogy community.
To help you decide if you will enjoy reading my blog, here is a list of topics I am interested in:
- The many ways of formats for storing family trees, such as GEDCOM and the myriad of proprietary options
- The GEDCOM 5.5 standard that forms the foundation of computer storage of family trees
- Open standards in genealogy
- The best ways to digitally archive your old photos and documents
- Metadata! Wouldn’t it be great if all your old photos had the date and location information on them? Do your descendants a favour and add that useful information to the metadata of your digital photos
- How maths and statistics can teach you about your ancestors
I expect to be posting every few weeks, so stay tuned and comment if you are interested!
— Jack