FHS - Plans for the Future
There are two major objectives that I would like to accomplish sometime:
Each of these could involve as much effort as has gone into the latest update to the Family History System and it may be awhile before I am again willing to commit that large a portion of my "free time" to a single task.
- redesign the family file format to make up for current deficiencies (e.g. short place names and lack of support for recording information sources) - this would of course include making appropriate changes to the software to take advantage of the new file design; NOTE: support for "Long Place Names" was added in August 1998
- prepare a version of the software designed to run in the Windows environment - (in addition to "putting a pretty face" on the software, this would allow using Windows resources for other things such as processing scanned images).....(Note: preliminary results of efforts in this direction are now available at this site.)
There are some ways that the Family File format could be enhanced without undertaking a full file redesign. For instance, I would like to provide a better treatment of adoptions by adding a new Adoption Record to the Name File. It would be similar to a name record in that it would contain a Given Name and Surname, and two parent ID's. But the parent ID's would be adoptive parents and the "Birth Date" would be the date of adoption. Comments under the Adoption Record could record details about the adoption. The Adoption record would be merged with the children of the adoptive parents in descendant/relative reports that included adoptive relationships. The Adoption record would be linked to a standard Name Record in which the "birth parents" would be recorded. Children, marriages, addresses, and other miscellaneous record types would only be attached to the "Birth" Name Record An Adoption record would only be needed when both birth and adoptive parents were known, and there could be multiple adoption records for a single individual.
I've been thinking about adding another utility program too. One which would allow defining a sequence of operations (create WRK file, Index File, etc.) to be performed and reports to be printed for producing a complete "Family Book" from information in one or more family files. All of the instructions could be saved in a ".BDF" dataset or "Book Definition File". The utility could then read a ".BDF" file and automatically invoke all of the appropriate FHS programs to perform the operations and print the reports with little manual intervention.
The Sept 97 Update to the Family History System is the result of more than 3 years effort which has occupied nearly all of my "spare time" during that period. (Work on these programs remains the part time past time of a single individual, as it has been since 1984.) As a result, I will probably take several months away from this project and I can't say when you might be able to expect any more enhancements to the software. I hope that you will plan to revisit this site occasionally to find out about the current status of the programs and let me know of any ideas that you have.