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DougHenderson

Joined 6 April 2010

Introduction

I've been working on my family history for over 25 years. With the help of my wife, we have accumulated a great deal of information and media about our families.

As a computer professional, organizing my family history on the personal computer has been a priority.

Genealogical Program History

Over the years, I have used a number of freeware, shareware and commercial programs to organize my data, until finally settling on FamilySearch Personal Ancestry File program.

A number of years ago, I adopted Python as my first choice for scripting personal and professional solutions.

I wrote many small and large programs to display and modify GEDCOM files, and to import and export genealogical data between GEDCOM and various database engines and schemas.

Gramps

History

I have been following the development of Gramps since it first appeared on freshmeat.net. Recently (March 2010), I re-evaluated Gramps and found it ready to take over as my primary genealogical data repository.

I started loading and experimenting with a number of sample or example GEDCOM files, and with the GenTech TestBook story.

Plugin Development

GoogleEarthWriteKML2 Map Service

This is an update of the GoogleEarthWriteKML Map Service. I added a number of features to the generated KML/KMZ file to make the tool nicer to work with in Google Earth.

Doug's Place Fixer Map Service

This was a first attempt to incorporate some of my automatic place edits into a Map Service. I abandoned this when I realized that a Map Service plug-in did not offer the base service this type of plug-in requires.

Doug's Place Tool

This tool started life as a copy of the Extract Place Data Tool. It includes a modified version of the original Extract Place Data functionality, plus my own additional functions.

Some of my data ended up with place and location data that needed fixing. A small function tidies up these messed up places.

From previous development work, I have several strategies for extracting, interpreting and completing place descriptions. The huge advantage of Gramps over previous programs is the separate storage of the place description and location details. This allows retention of the unmodified place description while storing an interpreted and completed location. For example, in the Royal92 data, many places are described as this-or-that palace. I don't have to modify the place description to capture a more detailed place location for geocoding.

Oracle Import/Export Tool

This tool is at the design and development stage. Oracle is my database of choice when I get serious about putting data into an RDBMS. The main purpose of this effort is learning the Gramps data structure, and demonstrating that this import/export task can be done. I am using the SQLite Import/Export Tool as a starting point/inspiration.

I can successfully export all of my sample databases to my Oracle 10g database on a Linux box. I haven't figured out how to customize the export dialogs, so I am limited to writing to a hard coded destination at this point. 09:13, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

License

I, the creator of this work, hereby grant the permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.