Here is the problem: GEDCOM has become the de facto standard for family history and geneology data. And the problem with that is that the Mormons own GEDCOM and thus it is rife with built-in religious limitations. As you might expect, GEDCOM does not allow you to enter a family created by same-sex marriage or civil unions even where they are lawful. But there are other limitations. For example, in GEDCOM 5.xx, an adopted child does not belong to his family. When he looks up his family in a GEDCOM-compliant file, he is not there. How needlessly hurtful is that? If a guy marries his 14-year-old cousin as his fifth wife, GEDCOM has no problem dealing with that kind of family. But it cannot handle the Brady Bunch. Now I suppose you could defend GEDCOM by saying it is supposed to record only genetic --- that is, biological --- relationships. And of course, there are important scientific and especially medical uses for that kind of information. But it is not really true that GEDCOM records biological relationships. It presumes that the husband of a woman who bears a child is the father of the child, and we know since there is now DNA testing that assumption is untrue in a significant portion of cases. Which brings me to my point. I'd like to develop a family history system that is as compatible with GEDCOM as possible (since it is, as I have said, the de facto standard with tons of software applications), but with extensions to handle many diverse kinds of families that exist both in modern America and in many traditional cultures. So, I would be grateful for any pointers to existing software that handles all families or suggestions for extensions. -- Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> <http://myspace.com/larseighner> Countdown: 553 days to go. Owing to massive spam from googlegroups, I do not see most posts from there.