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I am not familiar with genealogy software. You might like to play with some existing tools before tackling this project. Basically you create a ram-resident tree of objects, representing a family tree. You have Person objects. They have fields for name, sex, date of birth, date of death, city and links to parents, spouses and children (array or ArrayList of references). There are probably other fields you will want such as a reference to where you discovered the data, or notes about the person, perhaps even a photo. You manipulate this tree purely in RAM (Random Access Memory). You save and restore it with serialization.

If you had a very large tree, you might consider using a persistent object database like ObjectStore.

What can do you with this data?

  1. You could let the user navigate around it, showing one person at a time, letting him click links to view the related parents, spouses or children.
  2. You could print a giant chart centering any one individual, showing his ancestors fanning out above and descendants fanning out below.
  3. You could display this chart, allowing the user to scroll over it.
  4. You could find individuals by name, birth date, city.

To be useful, you will need to import data from other sources and also export it for other programs. You might even do this interactively and online. It would be simpler to implement this as an application, but it could also work as an Applet in conjunction with a servlet that saved and filed away the various family trees on the server.

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