The
Family Tree is, mathematically speaking,
not a tree. A tree is a "graph without loops", which cannot represent a genealogy due to the nature of the child-parent relationship based on two sexes.
The term "genealogical tree" or a "family tree" appeared due to two main reasons:
- Massive brain damage in majority of the specialists in genealogy during historical period when this field of activity (I refuse to call it "science" in the same sense as biology, history or mathematics related to this topic) became fashionable.
- Undisputed sexism of the researches and clients of genealogical study during this historical period; ignoring of the female sex in family relationships was a common place, one of the distinct sign of it is the modern tradition of passing the family name by the male line.
More adequate term would be a
pedigree or
ancestor chart, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_tree[
^]
For more details, see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy[
^].
This is a list of well-known genealogy software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_genealogy_software[
^].
This is a list of Web-based genealogy software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web-based_genealogy_software[
^].
I hope some research in this software can make and idea of what's involved (and I would say, if it worth the effort or not :-)).
The mathematical model of the genealogy is fairly simple, it can be easily cast in data model and isolated from the presentation. It can be relatively big but not extremely difficult project.
—SA
Submit an article or tip