FAQ

Some general questions and answers that are common to all reports:

##How is the information stored ?

Although this might seem like a highly technical question of little concern to most people, it is actually very relevant. In most genealogy application, the information you entered is stored in a proprietary format. The only way to extract that information and import it in another software is to export in the GEDCOM format (and it is well known that this format is limited and cannot contain all the data that modern genealogy applications store).

Some applications are able to directly import data from another application. The developers have done reverse engineering to try and understand the format, but there is no guarantee that this will always work.

By contrast, Geneaprove stores everything in a standard SQL database (which you chose, it can be sqlite, postgreSQL, mysql,...). The schema of the database is fully public and documented, which means that there are lots of interfaces out there that gives direct access to the data (web, GUI, command line,...)

Furthermore, Geneaprove is open source. This means that even if its developers cease to maintain or develop it, all is not lost. First, your data is still accessible as always. There is no license that expires. If you are a developer yourself, you can take over the maintainance. If you are not, you might be able to motivate other people to take over the maintainance.

##Is there a limit to the number of persons in the database ?

No.

Geneaprove uses a real database (postgreSQL, mySQL or sqlite) as its data storage, and they do not impose limits.

Geneaprove is carefully optimized to limit the number of queries. For instance, to display the pedigree, it needs one query per generation in your whole tree (even in the parts that are not displayed), plus a few others to get the birth and death dates. Using style highlighting for the persons does not add more than a few extra SQL queries, so these are all pretty cheap, especially when the database is also running locally on the same machine.

##Does geneaprove support same-sex marriages ?

Yes.

A marriage is just an event in which several people took part, just as in any other event. These persons are given a role in the event (for instance husband and wife), but nothing prevents you from either creating new roles (partner), or using two husbands or two wifes.

Some events and roles plays a special part since they are used to display the pedigree and fan charts (father and mother of a child for instance).

##Does Geneaprove handle the implex ?

The implex is one person appears several times in a pedigree (for instance, the same couple was the parents of two of your ancestors). Like all other genealogical software, Geneaprove will of course not duplicate data about those persons in the database. In addition, you can configure the highlighting styles so that a person that appears multiple times in the tree or fanchart visible on the screen gets special colors (background or foreground) and/or fonts. This makes it easier to see them immediately.

##Does Geneaprove support sources ?

Although support for sources is currently limited, Geneaprove will nonetheless show a special tick mark next to birth, marriage or death events when they have a proper associated source. This is a convenient way to find out which sources should be updated.

##What format should I use for dates ?

Geneaprove supports multiple input formats for dates. In particular, the usual formats yyyy-mm-dd, dd-mm-yyyy, "yyyy mm, dd", as well as ambiguous formats like "about yyyy", "ca yyyy", "between yyyy-mm and yyyy". It also supports other calendars like Julian dates and the French revolutionary calendar.

In fact, you are free to use any format you want, and geneaprove will store it exactly as is in its database, and print it exactly as. But it will try internally to make sense out of it, for sorting purposes. This is done automatically.

##Will Geneaprove preserve accents and special characters ?

Yes.

Geneaprove's code is fully unicode-based. This means that all accented characters, asian characters and in fact any character you can currently type on your computer will be properly stored in the database, then manipulated by Geneaprove, and finally properly displayed on the web pages.

##Does Geneaprove provide support for merging persons ?

No.

The idea is at the heart of the gentech datamodel that Geneaprove uses. Here, you create any number of personas, each representing a few aspects of a real-life person. For instance, if you find a birth record for John Smith, you create a persona (number 10 for instance) where you only record the date and place of birth (and of course, the source where you found that information!) If you then find a death certificate for a John Smith, you create another persona (number 11) where you only record the date and place of death, and the source.

You then link the two personas 10 and 11 and indicate they represent the same physical person. That link should have a rationale that explains why these two personas are likely to be the same (in other software, this would be a merge operation, but here we can also provide and store an explanation for the merge).

At this point, Geneaprove will only show one John Smith in the pedigree and the list of people. But this John Smith has both birth and death dates and places. So this is similar to merging in other applications.

The real strength of the Gentech model, however, comes later. If at any point you find out that personas 10 and 11 are not the same after all, you can break the link we created earlier (and always with a rationale and source, if possible). Geneaprove goes back to showing two John Smith in the list of persons, one where the birth is known, the other where the death is known. If you ever want to link these again, Geneaprove will be able to tell you this is likely incorrect, and show you the rationale you provided before, thus preventing you from doing the same mistake again (or not...)

The same possibilities exist if you want to undo a gedcom import. Only the personas imported from that gedcom are removed (along with their associated information). As a result, you are automatically back to where you were before, with the same information available in your database, without your having to worry about which information came from gedcom and should now be removed.

In other applications, after the merge, there is no trace as to where each pieces of information came from. So you have to manually create a new John Smith, and manually copy some of the information from the merged one to the new one, then delete them from the merged one. And you are on your own to decide which information should be moved.

When you import a Gedcom file, Geneaprove provides a checkbox that allows you whether you want to create a single persona for each person in the gedcom, or whether you want to create one persona for each source/person found in the gedcom, and automatically link these personas together.

See Gentech for a technical explanation of the database.