Software

I use John Steed's Brother's Keeper software to track my family history information. It is easy to use, and his policies regarding upgrades to the registered version are generous. If you decide to use this software, please support him by registering.

The HTML Tidy program, formerly a product of the W3C and now an independent project, is used to clean up the HTML generated by BK6. Three major reasons I use it is that (1) it puts a valid <!DOCTYPE> tag at the top, (2) it converts all tags to lower-case, and (3) it moves <hr> tags outside of <pre> blocks (more on this can be found here). To retain the original vertical spacing around the migrated <hr> tags, I use the stream editor, sed, to change all instances of:

</pre>
<hr>
<pre>

</pre>
<hr>
<pre style="margin: 0px;">

Bersoft's Word HTML CleanUp 1.0, a free front-end to HTML Tidy, is very handy for cleaning up files that are created in RTF format by BK6 and then converted to HTML by Microsoft Word.

The PDF reports generated from Brother's Keeper were made using the Free PDF software, which creates a pseudo-printer device so that the output of any program can be saved in PDF format. You will need to have the free Adobe Reader software installed on your computer to view these files.

This web site was written using a text editor (the Unix "vi" editor, and its free workalike, "vim", to be exact). Of course, I could not have done it without the following documents from the W3C, which I have referenced repeatedly in order to have a site that is fully XHTML 1.1 and CSS Level 2 compliant:

• The HTML 4.01 Specification
• The XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 Recommendations
• The CSS Level 1 and Level 2 Recommendations

The yellow background came from Web Page Backgrounds, a great source for a variety of free background images.

I am also starting to use Paul Johnson's Gedcom.pm module for the Perl programming language. There is a related Perl-GEDCOM mailing list for those interested in using Perl to parse GEDCOM files.

When I program in perl, I find it useful to have a Unix-like environment to work in. The Cygwin and CyGNOME packages provide such an environment for Microsoft Windows XP Professional, the operating system I use on my home computers.

Note that each of my scripts work best if you have a fresh, GEDCOM-format, file generated from your software's database. As I write any new interesting or useful scripts, I'll add them here:

• census: Scans a GEDCOM file for census information, and prints a matrix for all people who have census info entered. The default matrix is from 1850 to 1930, but this can be easily changed, at the cost of the output being wider than 80 columns. It also takes into account when people were born, when they died, and when they emigrated to the U.S. If it is invoked with a "-s" argument (for "short"), it does not print lines for people who have already been found in all the census years for which it expects to find them.
• religions: This script tallies up all of the religious affiliations that have been entered, and prints totals for each. It's a simple program, but was useful in learning how to work with GEDCOM data in Perl.
• checker: This script helps me make sure that I'm entering data consistently. I keep adding to it as I think of new things, and it has proven to be very useful. At the present time, it performs the following checks, some of which may be peculiar to the way I enter data and make use of GEDCOM fields:
  • All people must have birth date fields, with either a date, the word "UNKNOWN", or something similar in them.
  • All people born before the year 1900 are assumed to be deceased, and should have a death date field with either a date, the word "UNKNOWN", or something similar in it.
  • If census information is entered, it must contain the date, the place, a source, and a note (I use the note field to hold the location of the census data, including the sheet number and line).
  • I make use of the "Reference Number" ("REFN") field to keep track of census data I have found. This field is one of the few that Brother's Keeper allows to be printed on box charts, making it ideal for this purpose. A typical value might be "70/80/00/10", and this script makes sure that for each census year for which information is entered for an individual, the last two digits of the year appear in the reference number field. This won't work properly for people who have census information prior to 1840, and I may change this at some point.
  • If a person does not have a birth year entered, but they do have census data, the script prints a reminder that the information can be found there. It also prints a reminder that the 1900 census contains the month of birth as well as the year, if census info for that year has been entered. These reminders will not print if a note, if any, for the birth date contains the word "illegible", referring to the census data.
  • For family data, if either a husband or wife name is not present, a warning is printed.
  • If the "Marriage" ("MARR") field is either missing or does not contain a date or the word "UNKNOWN", a message is printed.

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