I’ve been looking at a piece of
software called Centurial and it is quite interesting in its approach
to doing genealogical analysis. The design of the application is
quite different from anything I’ve seen in my 25+ years of playing
with genealogical software.
The
main features are correlation
of source materials to instances of persons in such a way that there
is little doubt that they refer only to each other. Centurial has a
scrollable and zoomable visual “network” view so you can see the
relations of persons to each other. Sources are entered in a very
nice way, according to the E. S. Mills Evidence
Explained format.
There
is a space in the analysis pane to enter a proof argument but there
is currently no way to output that information in any manner, other
than copy and paste; not even
to a basic HTML document. You can, however, export a GEDCOM file with
the tree you’ve built for
transfer to a GEDCOM-based program such as Family Tree Maker or
Brothers Keeper.
The
Centurial author discusses the differences between his data model and
the GEDCOM model on the website referenced below. His website has
some small amount of documentation but otherwise you are on your own
to figure out how to use the program.
One
of the few
drawbacks I noticed is that it takes some time to import and convert
an average GEDCOM file. For instance, my regular-use GEDCOM is only
about 2.5 megabytes and the converted project file is about 25
megabytes. That is a serious size difference. I haven’t looked at
the insides of the project file to see what’s what, but I suspect
that there is a heckuva lot of XML markup in there.
Centurial
is written in English with a European flavor. You may want to view
the three tutorials on YouTube before you download and start working
with Centurial. They will explain quite a bit about how the author
uses it and the potential use cases you may have for it.
Overall,
I think Centurial is quite an achievement software-wise. It is not
really intuitive but then genealogy itself isn’t all that easy. As
it has only been around for a couple of years, I doubt many people
have heard of it, though. I recommend it for intermediate or advanced
genealogists.
Centurial is available here: https://www.centurial.net/, and is free at the moment although it does require registration and some data collection by the author. It is also a Windows-only product (7, 8, or 10) and requires a recent version of the .NET framework. Personally, I’d like to see a Linux version as well because that’s what I use most of the time.
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