Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog » Blog Entry

A New(?) Genealogy Program –Treebard - Mon, 4 Mar 2024

One of the reasons why I closed GenSoftReviews last year was because the development of new programs for genealogy had been drying up. There are so many full featured genealogy programs available to choose from that there is hardly any task that at least some of them could do.

And with the onset about 10 years ago of genealogy software that could provide you record hints and tree matches automatically, anything less would be a no-go for most people.

Treebard

So to my surprise, yesterday I learned about a program that I had not heard of previously in a Facebook post from Tamura Jones. The program is called Treebard, by Scott Robertson. He describes it as:

“a free, open-source, portable, public-domain genealogy database-entry showcase of functionalities written in Python, Tkinter, and SQLite”

I had to Google “Tkinter”, because I didn’t know what it was.

If it were just another genealogy program, then I wouldn’t have been bothered. But it is the wealth of content that Scott has included on his website about his programming endeavor that interested me and made me take notice.

Scott’s Philosophy

Scott’s program is not brand new, but it is relatively new on the scale of when most genealogy programs were being started, which is decades ago. The program’s Readme on Github states that Scott, with the username ProfessUdGuru, started developing the program in July 2018. That’s almost 6 years ago, and what surprises me is that neither Tamura nor I had heard of the program before.

Scott’s writings include a lot of commentary about GEDCOM, (that I’ll come to in a bit) which he dismisses by stating:

“I am particularly fond of the idea that someone will see the light about continuing to limp along with GEDCOM, and instead just start using Treebard’s database structure (UNIGEDS) or be inspired by it, to give birth to a Universal Genealogy Data Structure which would replace GEDCOM if app developers could be inspired enough to all use the same data storage structure for their app’s primary features.”

He writes about Treebard’s Kind of Genealogy:

Not conclusion-based, and not evidence-based, but one-factoid-at-a-time-based.
Super easy to enter sources without copying and pasting.
Conclusions are backed up by assertions. Assertions are backed up by sources. He says his assertions feature is unique to Treebard. Although I think it very much resembled the persona idea promoted by Tom Wetmore, developer of Lifelines. “Assertions are what your sources say.”
A friendly and intuitive user interface. It should be easy to do complicated things.
A simple and straightforward data structure, good enough for all programmers to adopt someday.

His Videos

Scott has a new YouTube channel with 38 videos that he’s added in the past 3 weeks. They are all very interesting and worth watching

2 are about Treebard’s Philosophy
4 are about using Treebard

10 are a Treebard GPS Tour 2022
1 is about his Trying to Use Gramps Genealogy Software
2 are about Genealogy Resources
8 are about GEDCOM programming
12 are a Do-It-Yourself Genealogy Application 2024 (Scott’s jouney in the writing of his program)

And he’s funny as well. You’ll enjoy Scott’s unique honest presentation style.

The Database

I was very curious as to what Scott’s “Universal Genealogy Data Structure” looked like. He used much of what would be considered common practice, following GEDCOM’s record and data structures in many cases (e.g. his dates are just like GEDCOM).

In one of his videos, he said he originally didn’t want a family record, but eventually decided he needed one to hang his family events onto.

Below is his data structure from his Create Your Own Genealogy Software 002 video. (Click on image to get a larger image).

Notable: he has a Place table (a big omission from GEDCOM).

And unlike GEDCOM, his database has an Events table, effectively making his program an events-based program. In the early days of GEDCOM, an Event-GEDCOM standard was developed parallel to our conclusion-based GEDCOM, but it didn’t really catch on. Scott would probably prefer Treebard to be referred to as an assertion-based program, since the assertions that are attached to sources are his unique feature.

Here for example is how Treebard presents its assertions from his Tour 008 video:

Scott’s Thoughts on GEDCOM

Of all his videos and writings (and there’s a lot of it), my favorite is Scott’s commentary about GEDCOM. Here’s his points that intrigued me the most:

Scott took more than 3 months to create a GEDCOM import program by “curbing my appetite for perfection.”
He replaced all of GEDCOM’s ambiguous tags with unambiguous tags.
He did not handle “edge cases such as tags that no one uses since they’re so very close to being useless”.

He ignores all custom tags. See! Most programs will not read them. Not GEDCOM’s fault. Fault of programmers who indiscreetly use them instead of alternative valid constructs that GEDCOM does provide.
Scott correctly adds:”Custom tags are used so much for storing vendor cruft–which is not their purpose–that each vendor has created a master’s course in navigating their personal flavor of GEDCOM abuse.”

Scott introduces gedMOM – “a GEDCOM file designed as if it were meant to stuff genealogy data directly into a UNIGEDS database, with no hiccups.” – I like that idea.

Scott describes the GEDCOM NOTE tag as: “details that don’t fit elsewhere” which is an excellent definition.

Scott correctly maps his own ASRTN (assertion key) onto GEDCOM’s TEXT tag. It’s just that most genealogy software developers never thought of it that way.

Scott ponders: “Why is it so easy to write a GEDCOM export program when it is so difficult to write a GEDCOM import program?”
His answer: “Simple. With the export project… you’re starting from your own data structure, so you aren’t lost in the wilderness of someone else’s ideas of how things should be done;”

Since “1 MARR N” (not married) is not allowed in GEDCOM, Scott proposes: “1 FACT unmarried – 2 TYPE marital status” which is a very logical way of doing it that I’ve not seen anyone else suggest.

Check out the rest of Scott’s GEDCOM page (items 17 to 93) for his many other comments about GEDCOM specifics that I mostly agree with.

I’m My Own Grandpa

Finally, as an extra bonus, at the beginning of Scott’s GEDCOM page, Scott lists the lyrics to Jaffe’ and Latham’s “I’m My Own Grandpa” song. And, he provides a GEDCOM file for it!

I loaded the GEDCOM file into Behold and Behold correctly reports that there are no loops. Actually the grandpa relationship is not by birth or adoption but is only through marriage which technically makes it possible. I’ll leave you to figure it all out as an exercise.