Visualizing family networks
A family is a very complex network of people. When two persons decide to live together, they start a family. When a child is born, she belongs to a family.
A family tree may be immense, unexpected, or surprising. If one family member meets and decides to live together with someone on another continent, the two families join in a single family.
There are many problems here: how to find information, organize it, and visualize it in a useful way.
Churches used to keep birth, marriage and death records for everyone after the Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563. Before that, only important families used to keep records of their members.
In each country, many manuscripts are available through dedicated archiving organizations, and one organization in particular, FamilySearch, provides links to most of those sites, all over the world.
Manuscripts may be difficult to read, and some attempts at automatic reading have to be considered with care.
So, there are people, alive or dead, and there are records, and the questions are to relate people in genealogical trees and to attach records to people.
People usually start by organizing their family tree, using some easy-to-use tool, paper, Excel sheets, or other, and data available in the family.
The next step uses to be to find a computer program, either to run locally or on the Web.
I prefer Web platforms, like Ancestry, MyHeritage, Geneanet, or others, and I use all of them since data can be downloaded/uploaded in the GEDCOM format, which was developed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an aid to genealogical research.
At the moment, I have more than 2000 people in my tree, and to see the full picture becomes more and more difficult.
This representation is very poor and doesn’t provide a view of contemporaneity, or the big picture.
This was the motivation to look to the GEDCOM format.
Without entering into all the details, there are two basic concepts, the individual and the family. The individual can be attached to one or two families, FAMC from Child, and FAMS from Spouse.
In the picture above, the first individual, me, @12147680407@ is attached to the family created by parents FAMC @F15@ and created a family FAMS @F9@.
The next individual, my father, created the family @F15@ I am attached, and is attached to the family created by his parents, and so on.
So, the first challenge was to extract this bipartite network from a GEDCOM file.
I developed a very short program that does just that, and also the surname associated with each individual.
I used Gephi for a first look at the data I extracted.
It was really interesting to have this idea materialised, and this will be the starting point for a lot of work.
Please comment.
