Places Entity

Add your enhancement requests to our ToDo list.
Post Reply
User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Places Entity

Post by Keith Wilson » Sun Mar 25, 2007 12:34 pm

Originally posted by ricky

Now this one I had to put some thought into. What is the one thing I have not found in any genealogy package that I would really benefit from and the one thing that really helps me tell the story of my ancestors, and how could we fit that into the iFamily methodology ?

When I started my family research it was all about " filling the gaps" - getting as many names and dates as I could as far back as I could. But now it is more about learning about those people, how they lived their lives, and what life was like for them. So now my research is not just about the people but about the places they lived and the time in which they lived. So how do we fulfill that requirement...?:-

A place ( country/town/city/village ) entity, to which people can be linked [the Birth At and Residence Event fields could link directly to a place entity], where you can tell the story of the town in which our ancestors lived, illustrate with pictures and maps, and how the history of the place our ancestors lived ties in with their past and their professions. This, I think, would be a true selling point for a genealogy package ( and perhaps a tours de force for the developer ! ).

This could use events associated with the Place - e.g. who came to the throne of England when, or the period of time covered by the industrial revolution.

I image a horizontal pane showing a timeline of the place, with events marked on it, and when a person is linked to that place at birth, their name/picture is shown on the timeline. A narrative of notes and comments and pictures/maps can then accompany the place. This will allow us to tell the story of our ancestors, in the context of where they lived and worked.

The beauty too, is that this commentary of the Place is not specific to an individual, that we can see how it applies to many people in our database or even people in other databases - e.g. we can share these Place entities, on our Mac or even on the website or forum.

I think the solution is simple - a new entity type and a new timeline pane, and a relationship between people and place entities, and a means by which to load entities so that they might be shared - but it brings a huge new dimension to the package.....

Perhaps a first phase would be to create the new entity type and the creation of link between place and person, with a extra tab long the bottom [ next to the Story tab ? ] for the Place entities to be viewed and edited.


Maybe the timeline and file sharing could come later..

Ricky.

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Places Entity

Post by Keith Wilson » Mon Mar 26, 2007 12:06 pm

Originally posted by ricky

P.S. I currently do this kind of stuff using Sources, but it if far from ideal, and is just bending things around and a bit manual heavy... iFamily looks like it could have better potential...along the story lines....

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Places Entity

Post by Keith Wilson » Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:59 am

This type of info (Event Place reference/historical info) could grow considerably and I think that the iFamily database is probably the wrong place to store the raw data. Maybe another option is to allow Event Places to be hyperlinked to an external file or website URL that contains info about the place, but then the web site links could get broken over time.

In the next version (not yet released) of iFamily for Tiger you can drop text, pdf, rtf, ... files into the pictures pane and then double click to display it with your favourite word processor, Adobe Reader, ....

Maybe iFamily should provde a similar picture gallery for Events as to that provided for people. Then again, based on the KISS principle, maybe just another Story page that is attached to an event would do the trick, maybe not. The new Event Story page would have to be able to be attached to many events / event places.

I will think about it.

Regards, Keith

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Places Entity

Post by Keith Wilson » Tue Mar 27, 2007 11:19 am

Originally posted by ricky

Thanks for your thoughts Keith, sounds like you understand the requirement very clearly !

I like the Event/Story idea, with the 1:M relationship between story and event/place. But, if I refine the requirement along KISS principles, wouldn't it be simpler to have a 1:1 relationship between Place and Place Story ( or external " picture" ), since the relationship between Event and Place already exists ?.

[hr]
Meanwhile...., it looks like I can use sources in a much better way ( at the moment I can just put a single picture and use the notes field on a source ), as you already have something we can use in the next version ...

You say:- "
In the next version (not yet released) of iFamily for Tiger you can drop text, pdf, rtfd, ... files into the pictures pane and then double click to display it with your favourite word processor, Adobe Reader, ....
"
So I can create an external RTD for the place story.

Then I can create a source for the event, of type " Place" , and drop the RTFD onto the Picture for the place.

Then, on the sources screen, I can see all people/events linked to this source in the bottom right " where used" table ( only problem here is that it just shows the event type but no date - birth is OK, because that is shown alongside the person's name, but for a residence event it just shows the text " residence" ).

This would not be a complete solution though, but it is a workaround: I have to manually create the Source and manually link it to each event, rather than simply associate the Story with the Place, and have the software derive the relationship between event and place and then story. Does this sound about right ?

many thanks, Ricky.

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Places Entity

Post by Keith Wilson » Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:30 pm

Originally posted by ricky

Keith,

I'm still doing this, but finding it a bit of a drudge...

i.e. I create a source of Type " Place" , and Title, for example, might be " Imber, Wiltshite, England" .

And in that source I can store information about the town of Imber and link in a PDF or RTFD document which is a document about the place, with text ( e.g. history ), images ( e.g. maps, photos ) and so on.

But I then have to manually add this as a source to every Event Place called " Imber, Witshire, England" .

I wonder if this could be automated in some way ? or is my requirement to specific to me ?

many thanks, Ricky.

User avatar
Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Places Entity

Post by Keith Wilson » Thu Aug 16, 2007 3:02 pm

Originally posted by Marc

I'm very much in support of what Ricky has been expressing. I, too, am very interested in telling the story of my ancestors and understanding how they lived. A major part of that is having an understanding of the places that they lived. By including dates of founding of towns, etc. it also helps to validate various dates of events of ancestors. I'd also like to see the ability to include Lat/Long and the ability to link to Google maps, etc. This helps to give a sense of the geography of a place (at least as it exist today). And by being able to add all of this to a place it will then travel with anyone linked to that place.

Marc

Post Reply