Researching my family tree has always been of interest to me and over the past couple years several things have happened that keep me coming back to getting on with the research. But me being who I am I always have a 100 and 1 things going on but this weekend I’ve decided to spend some FREE time on getting this started. Then contacting all my relatives my mother has told me about who are doing the same kind of research to work with me collaboratively online. And in order to do that I needed a piece of software to facilitate the process. So of course because I always look to the OS community before considering purchasing something I found another great free application called PHPGedView ( http://www.phpgedview.net/features.php). I even learned the software has a bridge or allows you to run it within a PostNuke website. Who would have guessed?

But anyway, I’m in the process of setting up the application right now and after I get it setup and invite my relatives to join and contribute. But what’s truly amazing is I can have this site setup and ready for use within a few hours. Wow!

BTW: Here’s the info directly from the PHPGedView.com site:

“PhpGedView is a revolutionary genealogy program allowing you to view and edit your genealogy on your website. PhpGedView has full editing capabilities, full privacy functions, can import from GEDCOM files, and supports multimedia like photos and document images. PhpGedView also simplifies the process of collaborating with others working on your family tree. Your latest genealogy information is always on your website and available for others to see.

Traditionally, you run a genealogy program on your home computer and enter in all of your information. With the data on your computer, you have a couple of problems. First, how do you share the data with your relatives? Second, how do you synchronize your data with your relatives when they make changes on their computers?

Traditional genealogy programs allow you to share your data on the internet by exporting it from the program to HTML pages. However, this creates thousands of files that are difficult to manage and even harder to find the data in. These types of websites are also difficult to update because anytime you make a simple change in your genealogy program, you then have to create all of the HTML files over again. With HTML pages you also have to worry about privacy issues.”

Note, PHPGedView was started in June 2002 about a year after the OS PostNuke CMS project started! Small world.