Richard Smith wrote: > But the really simple applications are valuable too. For example, I'm > envisaging data entry for baptisms as a spreadsheet-like interface, > say with columns for date, name, sex, father and mother (though they'd > be configurable). (I certainly don't want one dialogue box per person > as most applications have!) Once you've transcribed them from the > parish register, it would be nifty if it could auto-group them into > families. Often there are lots of children that partition into very > obvious sets of siblings, and having the them automatically group > together allows you to focus on the less obvious ones. I do this sort of thing manually & can see the extent to which it could be automated. But it involves taking into consideration occupational & geographical factors. That brings us to another area where existing systems fail. Places are hierarchical. If one event is said to have occurred in the parish if Dunny-on-the-Wold it need not be inconsistent with its involving the same person whom another event places at the hamlet of Dunny Parva within the parish. What's more there are overlapping civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies and they will change with time. And then places described as "vil" or similar can be different in different contexts: if the main parish register says "vil" it will not mean the same thing as "vil" in a chapel of ease within the parish. This sort of subtlety isn't obvious to researchers living outside the area. In fact the large online providers generate a stream of complaints about quite gross errors. This, of course, provides a further opportunity because if a standard format could be devised such specialised knowledge could be encoded by local experts and re-used by remote researchers. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk