I’ve been a little too busy building Forebears to take the time out to explain why I built it and what I’ve built. So my apologies for the long ‘radio-silence’.
About three years ago in about 2019, I was approaching the end of my working life as a business consultant in the technology sector. For over twenty years I’d helped people adapt to change in their organisations. So with just two or three years of salaried employment ahead of me thoughts turned to planning for an independent future.
Forebears originated in that period and out of a personal interest in family history. I’d had an idea for showing a person’s forebears (their mother and father and these people’s mothers and fathers, etc) as a series of concentric circles with them at the centre. Of course, this style of diagram is not new in genealogy and I don’t claim to have invented it. But the idea of implementing an ‘Ancestral Wheel’ via a mobile app was a new one back then. Just a shame that I had no idea how to implement it!
Some in their late middle-age solve crossword puzzles or learn a foreign language to keep their brains active. I did much the same by learning the Swift programming language and teasing out bugs in my program code.
It’s been a journey, but a worthwhile one. The ‘Ancestral Wheel’ has grown to become a fully-fledged genealogy app available to iPhone and iPad users on the AppStore with users from all around the World. These users are my new clients and Forebears is continually changing and improving to serve them as family-historians.
In the next post I’ll explain how Forebears version 1 (4Bears) evolved and launched on the AppStore.
Opsisoft Apps 