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Two Topics: GEDCOM and Calendar Confusion!?
Two Topics: GEDCOM and Calendar Confusion!?
by Scott Lee of Heritage Seekers
#1 GEDCOM – Short for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, GEDCOM is a file format used to transfer family tree data from one system to another. It was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). It is the universal method of transferring a family tree database from one program to another or to and from websites. Few people realize that it is a simple text file that is human-readable. This presentation will demystify this file type and teach you how to read it and even how to make simple edits.
#2 Calendar Confusion!? – Why was Thursday, October 4, 1582, followed by Friday, October 15, 1582, but only in some countries? Pope Gregory XIII did not invent the Gregorian Calendar, who did? George Washington was born on February 11, 1731/32. So, was he born in 1731 or 1732? Why does the date of Easter shift around, sometimes before Passover, sometimes after Passover, but rarely coinciding with it? October is derived from octo, Latin for eight, so why is it the 10th month? Did the Russian “October Revolution” really occur in November? Why does the Hebrew calendar sometimes have 13 months? These questions and more will be answered.
Scott is a retired software engineer who has been researching his family history since 1979. He has served as an officer in several genealogical societies and lectures on genealogical topics. Currently, he is a board member of the Arkansas Genealogical Society and President of Heritage Seekers. In 1995, he helped design the GEDCOM 5.5 standard for transporting genealogical data, improving its syntax to be more easily read by software and fixing several issues in date specifications. He created the calendar conversion website rosettacalendar.com and his date manipulation library is used by many software packages including PHP which is used in more than half of all websites. Scott grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, but his work took him to Indiana, Oregon, North Carolina, and New York City. In retirement, he, and his wife, Deirdre, have returned to their families in Arkansas.
His career included the medical field, engineering computer graphics, and consulting in the process of building reliable software. In retirement, he is working in the design of deep learning neural networks and software for genealogy. In his spare time, he enjoys writing science fiction, studying ancient calendars, writing free open source software, keeping up with the latest advances in physics and astronomy, and of course, researching his family history.
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0:02:00 Meeting
0:06:09 Presentation
1:42:09 Questions and Answers
2:07:04 End