Village (or community) family tree

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The Village (or community) family tree thread by webwurm uses Gramps in an unusual way. Worth reading the thread:

webwurm on 19 Jun 2024 in Reddit r/Genealogy
I wanted to ask if anyone has experience with community family trees and can share tips or best practices.

In detail: For more than 4 years now (phew…), I have been systematically recording marriage, birth, and death registers of a village in Austria (and its surroundings) into a large tree, and I have now recorded about 16,000 individuals in 6,000 families. The period starts around 1690, but mostly from 1780 onwards.

I am working with a self-hosted WebTrees, which I find very good for data entry and management; however, from the presentation side – for example, when I talk to an older neighbor about their family – I still miss the display features of MyHeritage (that huge canvas).

Even when I want to prepare for an interview (or want to present my findings to the community), it is a bit cumbersome. Exporting to Gramps and then displaying of the tree is of course possible, but what I would like to have, for example, is a graphical representation starting from one family, where I can expand or collapse individual nodes until I have the tree the way I need it – and then be able to print it.

But even with other tasks, maintaining a village family tree is quite different from a smaller one for a single family. Are there any experiences that could help me or where I could learn something? I look forward to any feedback! Thanks a lot!

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Multiple people that have been talking about this or asked for a better feature for this… Even here on discourse.

multiple people have mention this when I started to talk about Events for
Places, and also when I started to talk about Main-/Sub Events many years ago.

Multiple people here, don’t remember who, did Place research…

Multiple people researched military units, that also need similar features.

I research mercantile ships and found the limitations of all genealogy software, even the web based, really fast and that’s why I started to ask for this, to be able to connect people via places (houses, farms, ships, military unit, cities, Churches etc. etc.) AND to be able to display the connections.

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That could be a great feature for typical family trees, too – a nice alternative to filtering and “pruning”.

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What I found curious about this was: the OP’s pruning down a master Tree to a single branch before going to interview a family.

I don’t fully grasp the reasoning for that step. The master tree is only 16,000 people. Well within Gramps’ performance limits.

Are they leaving a copy with the interviewee and don’t want to compromise privacy of others?

Surely they take notes (or record a vid) rather than add to the tree during the interviews? (The data entry workflow is too tedious and would alienate an audience. Also merging the changes back into a master tree is too error prone.)

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I can’t answer how people doing this type of work actually do their workflow…
I only know that most interviewers use different tools depending on if they write the answers or do a recording and transcode it later.

But most likely they use normal interview workflow, with transcoding of the interview to a useable dataformat in hindsight.

My merchantile fleet research only depends on Newspapers, port documents and other documents I can find.
I don’t think there is a single person still alive (sadly), that can answer the questions I would have for them from the time period I “work” on.

But my logic tells me that the “best” way to plan this type of projects is either by doing place research i.e. interviewing “house by house” and focusing on the history if those places, i.e. “Do you know who lived here before your family moved in?” etc, or do a form of Event research, i.e. focusing on different events in the community’s history and work out from that… i.e.;
John, Margit, Irene, Peter and their families all attended to the Event at 10th of July 1789, but where did they actually live, and did they have more family in the area, did they live in a large family household or did they live as married pairs or as singles…

regarding the publishing of the data, maybe they do a little of everything, some text reports based on the families, so they need the privacy part. Some presentations where they can present more of the data, maybe with only family-names etc.

I really can’t speak for how someone else present or use their data…
I can only speak for my logic about how the data should be registered and/or be accessible and usable in multiple tools that can be helpful for both research and presentation, as well as the gathering and registration of data…

I can also dare to speak a little about what I have learned from others that have asked me question about different things, or about problems I have seen people having where I might see a solution outside the “mainstream” way of doing things… or by adding some feature that can be useful for someone that actually don’t know what they actually ask about…

You know, one problem that people think are only connected to Genealogy, can have good solutions in other area of research, that can and maybe should be implemented as a part of a “workflow” or solution in genealogy research…

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As far as I can check, he isn’t really pruning, but collapsing things. And that’s something that’s often quite easy on sites like Ancestry, and there are a few desktop programs that support it too.

Collapsing trees is a nice way to avoid distraction, and you often need that when you interview other people who could easily get overwhelmed by the amount of persons that you have in your database, if they can see them all.

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