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[edit] Mediawiki

This site is based on Mediawiki. The family trees are created by extracting an XML image of all the pages in the main namespace and parsing the Template:Person fields to create a data structure used by a Perl script to create the HTML pages. Another Perl script produces the surname index.

Dynamic Page List functions are used to create dynamic content such as the marriage links and the marriages page.

[edit] Marriage dates

Marriage dates are not really attributes of individuals, but attributes of their relationships. On the tree, the dates would not show up on the frame of the person, but on the line linking them. This logically (from a Codd perspective) means that there should be a separate "Marriages" page with couples and their marriage/divorce dates listed. Here, we keep this information in a Marriage template in one spouses' Wiki page. The software automatically transfers marriage data from a spouse's page provided there is an empty {{Marriage}} template there.

See [Ancestry.com] for an article on the limitations of gedcom, the "standard" for genealogy database descriptions.