03 February 2015

Virtual Pedigree - FHTL part 3

The next app I tried out from the Family History Technology Lab at BYU is called Virtual Pedigree.

To quote the FHTL website, "Virtual Pedigree is a dynamic interface that allows a genealogist to see a pedigree chart in a smooth and dynamic way. Instead of each person in the chart being statically placed on the screen, their position is adjusted to make room for ancestors coming into the screen from the right. This enables a quick and seamless traversal of the chart."


The above video gives a brief overview of the power of this application. Although the pedigree looks very different now.


It is very easy to navigate up and down the tree. The tree is color coded and had several symbols that help you to find areas that need attention. The left side of the application gives easy reference to what the symbols and colors mean.


Moving through my tree, it becomes apparent where there are some issues. It looks like I have two generations of women who are linked to two sets of parents. I need to clarify who their parents are and either merge or delete some relationships in Family Tree.

Just a reminder that the this is an Alpha release of this application. There are several iterations to follow. We may find errors or glitches as well and changes and enhancements over the next few months.

"There are more features to come that will further enable genealogists in their work. Some of those features are dynamic content zoom (where a person in the center of the screen has more data showing than people around the edges), integration with Google maps, and others."

The data that this application uses is also 2-4 months old. So you cannot look for errors, fix or update them, and then come immediately back to see the update in the application. Once this program is through the beta release then I am sure the data used will all be in real time.

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