Saturday 20 September 2014

The Lineage Trap

Back in May of 2014, I used the term “lineage trap” to refer to the distortion of historical research and its representation resulting from an undue focus on biological lineage. A good case in point is the GEDCOM data format which has steered the evolution of genealogy for far too long.



The reason for using this term is that the field of genealogy is more about history than mere lineage. It would be wrong to say that it’s specifically about family history since there are some side-lined activities, such as One-Name Studies and One-Place Studies, which are not fully embraced by genealogy, or by the software products that it uses. I have employed the term micro-history — effectively a fine-grained local history — as it more accurately encompasses these activities, as well as being inclusive of histories relating to places, houses, military groups, organisations, clubs, etc. I know of genealogists who have ventured into one-or-more of these activities. Although the research, analysis, and write-up are basically the same as for family history, our existing software products fall woefully short of accommodating them.

This opinion has confused some people, and scared the bejesus out of others. Why do genealogists need support for such a wide scope? Why should they aim for such a nebulous target and risk over-complicating both our products and our data standards?

Well, these are valid questions and deserved of a considered answer.

My contention is that most genealogists want family history rather than mere representations of lineage, and that micro-history can be accommodated with only a slight generalisation from family history. Furthermore, that generalisation gives a cleaner picture of history generally, and provides the flexibility necessary for any unexpected or fringe avenues of research.

Let’s start by just looking at the case of history relating to people. Family historians cannot guarantee that their person references will all be representable on a single family tree. Obviously there may be adoptions, fostering, step-families, and half-siblings, but there may also be mentions of unrelated people who played some profound part in their history. Should they be relegated to a simple note, rather than being represented by a full Person entity, simply because they’re unrelated? Most people would argue ‘no’, and that implicitly means that any lineage details must therefore be disjoint, i.e. the collection of people in the data may belong to multiple, independent trees.

By turning this statement on its head, though, then we see it in a fundamentally different way: the lineage is a property or attribute applied selectively within some set of people. In other words, it is the set of people, and their relationships to historical events, which is important, irrespective of whether there’s any shared lineage. You may be thinking that this is a trivially different viewpoint but the repercussions will hopefully make you think again.

Let’s just examine how we might represent unrelated people and the shared events in their lives.


This is basically the STEMMA® approach. Each Person entity can be connected to multiple, shared Event entities. The sources are usually associated with the Event, as befits their STEMMA definition as “a representation of a date, or range of dates, for which source information exists”.

The Person and Event entities are both what might be termed “conclusion entities” because they’re made up of the most accurate and verifiable properties determined through research.

The associated information for the Person properties is attached to the Event-to-Person linkage, which in turn will be specific to one of the sources supporting that Event. Hence, there may be multiple sets of Properties: one from each of the supporting sources. These are similar to, but not exactly the same, as the concept known as ‘personaa’ (see Genealogical Persona Non Grata).

The information for the Event properties (e.g. start date, end date, place) is attached to the Event-to-source linkage, and again there may be multiple sets if there are multiple sources for the Event. Such a set of event properties is sometimes informally called an “eventa” in acknowledgement of the persona concept.


This is all very symmetrical and nicely takes care of timelines, and the separation of information and conclusion. However, STEMMA has several distinct subject entities[1]: Person, Group, and Place. It treats these uniformly so the above diagrams could equally be changed to put Place or Group entities in place of the Person ones. The only difference would be an alternative set of Property names applicable to each of the entity types. This symmetry allows software to implement the subject entity relationships to both Events and sources in the same way, and similarly with tricky issues such as multiple names and name matching (see The Game of the Name). This is ideal fodder for designs based on “classes” and Object Orientated Programming (OOP).

So, here’s one important aspect of micro-history support. If you were studying the history of an organisation — say the masons and their many lodges — then any software that handled Persons in a generic, non-lineage fashion could easily be extended to do the same for those entities. Indeed, it has even been suggested to me that groups could be modelled using a pseudo-person concept, but why cheat like that? Why not do it properly?

In reality, whether you’re researching family history, or the history of the people in a given place (One-Place Studies), or the history of people with a common surname (One-Name Studies), or military history, etc., then we will need a mixture of these subject entities; any single source may contain references to persons, and groups, and places. For instance, a report of a soldier travelling with his regiment, by ship, from one posting to another.

But what about lineage? Well, lineage is just one form of hierarchical arrangement that happens to be applicable to Person entities. A hierarchy of biological lineage[2] is characterised by each Person having a fixed relationship to just one father and one mother. Places also have a hierarchical arrangement, such as a house, on a street, in a city, in a state, in a country. Place hierarchies are characterised by being time-dependent, and a Place may be split or merged (see Related Entities). Groups have similar hierarchical considerations to those of Places (see Revisiting the Family Group). These different types of hierarchical linkage can be applied to their respective entities without, in any way, changing the diagrams above; they are independent, and optional, types of linkage that do not impact the entity relationships to Events or to sources. Even STEMMA Events have hierarchical arrangements (see Eventful Genealogy).

In OOP terms, the specific classes representing these subject entities implement their own hierarchy semantics, but they share Event/source relationships and name handling from a generic subject-entity base class. It should be noted that these structural differences are not one-to-one with an on-screen representation. For instance, a family tree is just one representation of lineage; a pedigree chart being another. Similarly, there may be multiple ways of depicting a Place or Group hierarchy. The important point, here, being that any product that starts with a family tree as its core concept is artificially limiting its scope and distorting the historical picture. Whether you want to view a specific hierarchy type, or a timeline for any or all entity types, or a geographical representation of the entities, or some mixture of these, is a product visualisation feature rather than a core structural concept.

Another component of STEMMA that is essential for any type of historical representation is narrative. If you want to document the fruits of some research then you want narrative, not a family tree. If you want to explain how you arrived at your conclusions then you want narrative, not some stepwise recipe expressed in “computer speak”. If you want to share your family history with relatives then you want real narrative, not some bunch of fields in a database table or some computer-generated “narrative”.

This is one of the features that I’ve found hardest to explain to people, and yet it’s probably one of the simplest. The problem is that that non-software people are familiar with word-processors and so as soon as you mention narrative then they think of separate documents, such as Word or PDF. Separate documents, like these, would not be integrated with your data, and references to people, places, groups, events, and dates, would not be connected-up to the relevant parts elsewhere in your data. This simply means that you need a new document format that provides the necessary semantic mark-up to achieve this, as well as more usual mark-up for presentation. STEMMA goes further by including mark-up to represent transcription anomalies too. So do the software people get it? Yes, they do, but since most products will want to squeeze your data into some relational database then there’s no easy way to include such marked-up text in an indexed fashion; the result being that you’re limited to little snippets of plain text instead.

Isn’t this the same as a wiki-type approach to stories? Absolutely not! Those approaches are both a product and a data model, although I haven’t seen one where these can be factored apart. Even if it supported multiple marked-up documents, and events, and the historical subject entities (person/place/group), and their respective hierarchies, and sources, then it would still need a separately documented data model that other applications could read. But hang on, that’s what I’ve already done!



[1] A STEMMA ‘subject’ is something that we’re likely to find references to within historical sources.
[2] More-personal relationships, or non-biological relationships, are modelled via the Relationship Property.

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