It’s 10-months since I last released a new version of Forebears. So if you’re a Forebears User, you may be wondering “When’s the next update coming?”.
Well the answer quite simply is not quite yet. With around 15,000 downloads, and 6,000 in the last year alone, I’ve been waiting and listening to learn what all these Forebears users want that’s new.
And hear’s the odd thing. With thousands of downloads you might think that I’d have regular contact with a few hundred Forebears users? Maybe a handful of contacts a week? But actually no. Maybe 20 people have reached out to me over the life of the app. Some with easy-to-fix bugs but a few asking for really significant enhancements. A request to add Source functionality is perhaps the biggest but also maybe the most value-adding.
Sources and Source Citations
“Sources ensure accuracy, credibility, and traceability in family history, providing verifiable evidence for events, relationships, and facts, while avoiding errors or assumptions in genealogical research.” (Source: ChatGPT). Which is also what the books on the subject tell us.
Forebears today is a great little portable app to carry your family history project in your pocket. And of course you can also use it on your Mac. You can navigate around a family with graphics showing how people are related with summary tables to see the overview. You can even build your project from scratch within the App. In this way, Forebears presents the ‘answer’. But Forebears does not hold any information showing how the ‘answer’ has been derived or allowing others to verify that the ‘answer’ is correct.
For that, we need Sources functionality, which presents two non-trivial challenges:
- Source information is rich. The information about just one event – a marriage for example – may be derived from multiple source documents, photographs, tape recordings, an anniversary clock, etc. Each may contribute a few facts to our complete understanding of the event. How would our understanding of the event change if just one of these sources was incorrectly attributed? Wouldn’t we want Forebears to help us manage this complexity?
- Source information often comes first. The workflow for interacting with Forebears might need to be turned on its head. Users might start by taking an image of some source document at a physical archive, then describe this as a piece of evidence, before finally using its contents to add the associated facts. That’s potentially a massive change to screen designs.
The wait continues…
I’m going to wait a little longer before planning the next Forebears release. But when it comes, the likelihood is that it’ll include some support for Sources. It will also have those Guardrails I mentioned in an earlier post.
Opsisoft Apps 