Genealogy is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. The field of family history is broader than genealogy, and covers not just lineage but also family and community history and biography.
A wiki is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.
Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn.An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
GEDCOM, complete name FamilySearch GEDCOM, is a de facto open file format specification to store genealogical data, and import or export it between compatible genealogy software. GEDCOM is an acronym standing for Genealogical Data Communication. GEDCOM was developed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an aid to genealogical research. Most genealogy software supports importing from and exporting to GEDCOM format.
FamilySearch is a nonprofit organization and website offering genealogical records, education, and software. It is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is closely connected with the church's Family History Department. The Family History Department was originally established in 1894, as the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU); it is the largest genealogy organization in the world.
Genealogy software is computer software used to record, organize, and publish genealogical data.
Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites.
Wikimapia is a geographic online encyclopedia project. The project implements an interactive "clickable" web map that utilizes Google Maps with a geographically-referenced wiki system, with the aim to mark and describe all geographical objects in the world.
Gramps is a free and open source genealogy software. Gramps is programmed in Python using PyGObject. It uses Graphviz to create relationship graphs.
This article compares several selected client-based genealogy programs. Web-based genealogy software is not included.
Geni is an American commercial genealogy and social networking website, founded in 2006, and owned by MyHeritage, an Israeli private company, since November 2012. As of 2021, MyHeritage has kept its genealogical website separate from Geni's website, though the Smart Matches™ feature enables matching of Geni profiles to trees on MyHeritage and to other family tree sites and digitized records.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
Family Tree Magazine is a publication about genealogy and family history published by Yankee Publishing, Inc. in Blue Ash, Ohio and Dublin, New Hampshire. It has a paid circulation of about 70,000. The first issue was published in 2000, with David A. Fryxell as editor and later editor-in-chief. Allison (Stacy) Dolan and Diane Haddad also served as editors for the publication. Current editor Andrew Koch took on the role in December 2018.
MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform with web, mobile, and software products and services, introduced by the Israeli company MyHeritage in 2003. Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 19.4 billion historical records, among other features.
Family.Show is a free and open-source genealogy program written in C# and running on the .NET Framework. Microsoft partnered with and commissioned Vertigo Software in 2006 to create it as a reference application for Microsoft's latest UI technology and software deployment mechanism at the time, Windows Presentation Foundation and ClickOnce. The source code has originally been published on Microsoft's CodePlex website. It has since been forked and development continues independent of Microsoft on GitHub.
Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki developed by Australian software company Atlassian. Atlassian wrote Confluence in the Java programming language and first published it in 2004. Confluence Standalone comes with a built-in Tomcat web server and hsql database, and also supports other databases.
Rodovid is a free online collaborative family tree portal. Originally a Ukrainian project, as of 2012 it had active communities in 25 languages. It provides a web service built using MediaWiki and its own Rodovid Engine software to help store and visualize family relationships.
Ancestral Quest (AQ) is a genealogy software application for Microsoft Windows developed by Incline Software, LC. It features data entry with sourcing capabilities and scrapbook extensions; a print engine for standard or custom charts and reports; a web page creator; a collaboration engine; and an extension tool for other genealogy databases.
WikiTree is a genealogy website that allows users to research and to contribute to their own family trees while building and collaborating on a singular worldwide family tree within the same system. WikiTree is free for the user and financed via advertisements displayed to unregistered users. WikiTree is owned and hosted by founder's company Interesting.com, Inc.
