About

Representation

Since this site is about the St.Germain family name, I chose to focus on the patrilineal movement over time. The tree reflects this bias, leaving out the many ancestors on the female side.

Some genealogy sites and programs focus on the married couple, with the two names at the top, and then children's names underneath. This is problematic for representing people with multiple marriages, or children out of wedlock. It also tends to shrink the vital details of an individual – birth/death dates and locations – to fine print.

My format focuses on the individuals, with information in roughly chronological order: starting by listing two (hopefully biological, but who knows?) parents, then Baptism, Marriage, Children, Death, Burial. Most of the time, that's all of the recorded information about a person. For more recent ancestors, there are census records, military records, maybe news items. As I collect that information, I'll try to insert it in a way that makes visual sense.

I've also included historical narratives written by Denice St.Germain. Those are in PDF form and also linked on the individual pages. Thanks to Denice for all of the work she put into those documents!

Format

There are many ways to store genealogy data – from databases to semi-standardized text files, to graphs. I haven't found the ideal format. Most of them require special (often hard-to-use) programs to read/interpret the files. They don't seem like good, archival formats.

I chose to represent the data using plain-text files in a directory structure. The text files use minimal "markdown" formatting, making them easy for humans and machines to read.

A program could parse the files and convert them into some other format. If I find the ideal genealogy format, perhaps I'll include a program in this repository.

Fossil

The other factor that makes this site archival is that the entire thing is a Fossil repository. Each change is represented as an "artifact" and stored in a database, which is a single, well-understood file. The developers plan to support the format until 2050, at least. Will any of us be around by then?

Anybody with the fossil program can "clone" the entire site, as a backup, or to make their own changes. Just run:

fossil clone https://st.germa.in/family