I've spent years looking for decent genealogy software that suits my needs, and I'm almost at the stage of giving up and writing my own. However, before I do that, I thought I'd ask on this newsgroup whether anyone has any suggestions of suitable software. Most products I've tried are far too lineage-oriented. That's perhaps okay for storing the results of my research, but that's not what I'm after. I want something much more event-oriented that can store the research itself. I want to record that I found John Smith on the 1881 census, two plausible John Smiths on the 1851 census, and three possible baptisms. I want to be able to record what the record says, not what I think it probably means, including the different spellings used in different sources. Although that seems a reasonable enough requirement, a lot of products make it hard to use them like that. Entering census data is often particularly tedious. If I only wanted to do that, I'd probably just use a spreadsheet. But I also want an application that can let me say that I currently believe the John Smith on the 1881 census is the same person as the John Smith who was listed in the 1851 census on North Street, not the one on South Street, and that I don't believe this person is the same as any of the baptisms. And I'd like to be able to do this in a way that's easy to change when new evidence comes to light. This seems very hard in most of the products I've tried, and nigh-on impossible for negative assertions like "the John Smith on the 1881 census was not either of three baptisms found". I've also never found software that can cope satisfactorily with relationships more complicated than simple parent-child ones. For example, I would like to be able to say "John was the grandson of Thomas, and probably the son of Thomas's son Henry, though possibly an illegitimate son of Thomas's daughter Sarah". That's certainly something that a computer program ought to be able to handle in a structured fashion, but, again, I've never found one that can. My second requirement is that the software runs on Linux and doesn't require me to be connected to the Internet. (So a web-based program is fine, but only if I can install it locally.) If it were open source, that would be an added bonus, but it's not a requirement. My only other requirement is that the program must be able to export its database in some vaguely usable format and re-import it again. It's probably best if it's not GEDCOM because I doubt GEDCOM will map cleanly enough to the sort of concepts the program needs, but some XML format (even if it's undocumented) would be perfect. I'm not aware of anything that comes close to this. Even without the requirements that it runs on Linux and has an export format, I'm not aware of anything, and that strikes me as surprising. Surely my first requirement is just basic good practice? And whilst I'm sure that a lot of research is not done to particularly good standards, surely most software vendors must be familiar with what good research entails? So I'm really hoping that someone will be able to point me towards some really good piece of software that I've somehow overlooked. Any suggestions or comments gratefully received! Richard

Richard, I'm late to this discussion, but thought I'd leap in. Your first requirement is sometimes discussed using the terms "record-based genealogy" or "evidence-based genealogy". All current genealogical system are "person-based" or "conclusion-based." That is, you only add information to your database that you know to refer to a known person. This is how all beginners start out. It isn't 'til you're three or four or more generations back, when you find you can no longer be person-based. This happens when you reach the point that much of the data you collect is not yet obvious as to what person the data refers to. You may have to collect lots of data, and do lots of thinking and inferencing, before you can decide what is the best set of real persons to be the "best fit" for all the records you have discovered. When you reach this point in your genealogical maturity you are doing real, honest to god, historical research. The current generation of genealogical applications are simply not geared up to handle real research. The question becomes, once you reach the point in your "genealogical career" when you are doing true research, what do you do with all the record evidence before you can decide what persons it belongs to? Current genealogical systems don't have a good answer, thus much of your frustration and your first requirement. In my humble opinion genealogical programs should provide a way to codify the evidence into records that can be added to your genealogical databases independently of being added to a conclusion person. That is, our databases should support the entire "evidence layer" of data, which they don't do today, with the "conclusion layer" of data, which is all they support. I believe that the evidence should be codified into "person records" that are structurally very similar to the conclusion person records. That is, all your John Smiths should be encoded into their own "person records." I call these person records the "evidence person" records, and another name for them is "persona" records. Your software should then support a process whereby you build up "conclusion trees" from these persona records. These ideas are those that are behind the "DeadEnds" model I development more than a decade ago, and behind some of the software I have been working on. You have to add a little bit more, but by simply adding the persona layer to your applications, and a way in the user interface to construct conclusion person trees out of these persona records, you now have a genealogical system that supports true research. This is what you are begging for! These are not ideas new to me. There has been much discussion about adding true support for records and codifying information about persons into genealogical databases. The Better GEDCOM effort is in full swing now trying to decide how to do this. The OpenGen forum is also deep into thinking about this. The New Family Search tree from the LDS is based on combining persona records into person records, though in there case there is no hard and fast implication that the persona records come directly from evidence records. The term "persona" was popularized by the GenTech model, but that model is so hard to understand (because it is a fully normalized relational model, where the normalization completely obfuscates the underlying data model), that it has gone no where. Tom Wetmore