What did the life of my grandfather look like? Did he have siblings? Who were his parents? I had many question and on one of these Sunday afternoon I decided to go for it. I tried some genealogy websites and offline programs and selected Gramps. I found my grandfather into some of those websites that have digitized family records and started filling my database with ancestors, aunts, great aunts. I found that my grandfather had a small brother who died at the age of 3 and that his mother died of Spanish flu.
And then the moment came to share the result with my family, the ones that are still alive. I tried a few html generators but they all looked fairly old fashioned. Therefore I wrote one myself: gedcom2html. Gedcom is a (or the) standard for genealogy files. Gedcom2html uses d3 sunbursts for an ancestor and descendant fan chart. It uses d3 force simulation for a graph of all individuals in the gedcom file.
An example says more than words. So have a look at the family tree of the Dutch Royal Family You can convert a gedcom file to html yourself using my script on github: gedcom2html
Unfortunately the solution doesn’t scale. It works excellent for a gedcom file with a few hundred individuals. But with a larger gedcom file (>2000) the html files explode to 500 kB each. The script should be improved by moving functionality from the server (python) to the client (javascript). All data should be in a single json file and be read by the JS script. To be fixed during a future picnic.
