I'm a Britton, a name which is something of a special case, so I've had
reason to study the dark ages and far beyond for my kith and kin
history. My needs may be too unusual to justify much technical support,
but some observations may be useful.
Fixing any BC date problem is certainly needed, but there are other
related issues, and Timelines are such a valuable tool that they might
merit staff consideration too. There's reason to ask for a logarithmic
plot option, plus fallout from problems with gedcom and Legacy
compatibility. There is, of course, the question of why we should get
into this at all. I've found historical analysis useful for
conventional genealogy, but I'm primarily writing for those of my name,
born and unborn, who wonder, "Who and what am I?". Conventional
genealogy certainly doesn't suffice now we have the developing field of
genetics, and we and our ancestors were also moulded by linguistics and
culture. Those are hard to perceive, let alone understand, without
perspective and comparisons. Further, and especially for children,
presenting contextual and technical material as a family narrative
imbues it with a personal and human relevance that's hard to achieve at
the level of academic discussion.
Genetics easily takes us back tens to hundreds of millenia. No future
there with timelines scaled in decades, and linear treatment tends to
intolerably sparse at the beginning and confusingly crowded at the end.
That's also true for medieval to modern timelines, because we know so
much more about the recent. Some things, though, are best shown as a
linear snapshot or sequence of same. Can we have both as options, with
user defined scaling?
A gedcom is, by definition, a lineage linked list of individuals.
There's no structure to deal with Events beyond the expedient of linking
them to individuals. That noted, there's no restriction on the dates of
the events linked to an individual, nor, from the perspective of
structure, is there a requirement that an individual be real. One
option to embed and organize for gedcoms is to head a family with
surrogates who function as hooks for Events that give genetic and other
deep contextual information. Such "ancestors" can be named fancifully
or informatively, conventionally reported and plotted, or ignored by
delinking or starting a descendant report at the first real individual.
That's what I've done, but it's just one of several possible poor
workarounds, unless there's also change to Legacy.
For books and reports, we can use other software to generate custom
charts and have them linked by reference as OBJEcts in gedcoms. For
consistency in style, accurate and convenient access to the data, charts
would be better generated within Legacy though, and there's still the
imperative of linking to individuals. Surrogates don't seem much
problem for Legacy, e.g. it does view those who live several
centuries with skepticism but accepts discipline with a single
keystroke. (Doesn't seem to check if BC ??) One possibility would be
adopting, as a convention, inclusion of the "Surrogate Family". If
present, Legacy could then perhaps use alternative settings for them,
such as substituting Start and End for Birth and Death. For objects
generally, it would be very helpful, when Legacy makes a gedcom, for
there to be an option to cause the creation of a matching file
containing copies of all objects referenced, with the references
referred to that file. On distribution, the references should work
provided the directory is common.
kb
Judy wrote:
Thanks, Cathy. I do enjoy the historical analysis, so I'll ask staff
to consider fixing the "B.C." process.
Judy
...Judy, if this is important to you, I suggest you put in a bug report
on it. It's of no interest to me as I don't use Legacy for historical
analysis and my own family history only goes back to the 1700s. I
wouldn't expect to ever get it back before the 1500s. Not the slightest
sign of royalty ;-)
Cathy
...but I did not see where ANY
event could be 'forced' into a timeline. It will pick
up stuff from a person's own timeline, but...
Judy
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