Welcome to the Home Page of
Genealogical Data Systems
Background
Genealogical Data Systems was founded in the summer of 1980 and is
primarily engaged in the management of computer-based family trees for its clients. Using
programs originally developed by J. M. Engel in 1974 for IBM mainframes, it
progressively adapted them to smaller computers, such as the IBM 5110 and the popular DOS-
based PCs.
Basic Approach
From the start, our approach has been to separate all genealogical data about
a family into two database categories: idiopathic and morphologic.
- Idiopathic data is specific to each individual family member and is independent of
information pertaining to other members. Examples are: given proper names, dates and location
of birth, etc.
- Morphologic data is descriptive of how the members are related to each other and
thus contains the very structure the family is made off. Here the information changes every time
a new child is born, a new marriage occurs, etc., which may affect several members at a
time.
Kinology
Current activities focus more on descendant charts than pedigree charts. This
emphasizes data on families whose members, for the most part, all live in the same time period.
This is a branch of genealogy, called kinology. For a typical client family
consisting of 1500 to 2000 members, all will tend to be in no more than 7 or 8
generations.
Specialty
We specialize in the genealogies of European Jewish families. To that end our
software includes all German, Polish, Hebrew, and cyrillic characters and conversion algorithms
between the Jewish, Julian, and Gregorian calendars.
Publications
We produce books and reports, published privately, as part of our service to our
clients. Two publications are currently available to the general public. For details see Publications.
Address
Genealogical Data Systems
Post Office Box 6852
San Jose, CA 95150
Telephone: (408) 264-1280
FAX: (408) 723-0960
Internet: http://www.kinology.org
E-mail (general): GDS@kinology.org
E-mail (technical): support@kinology.org
Go to the ENGEL Family Web Site.
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