Information that is easy to digitize: Digitizing Family Relationships

Computer software is available that tracks your family tree in a digitized genealogical database. How are the family relationships tracked, such as father, grandmother, niece, son-in-law, and so forth?

Let's look at an example family and see how it can all be quantified (and thus digitized, since numbers can easily be converted to binary). We'll work with a fictitious family of five, the Van Dyke family:

Each person in the family can be represented in a set of digital forms:

Let's finish the digitization of Elsa. We need to convert each entry to binary. We will convert the letters of her name using the ASCII encoding scheme. Note that the space in the name "Van Dyke" must also be encoded. In the ASCII table, a space character uses the code 00100000.

With this simple structure in place, we can now compute other relationships. For example, to find Susan's grandmother, we locate her mother (by index number) and then look up her mother's mother (again by index number). Of course, real life can be rather complicated, so we might need to expand our structure to cover situations of divorce, remarriage, adoption, and so forth. We might also add some entries in our forms to allow for a picture of each person (digitized as earlier).

These pages were written by Steven H. VanderLeest and Jeffrey Nyhoff and edited by Nancy Zylstra
©2005 Calvin University (formerly Calvin College), All Rights Reserved

If you encounter technical errors, contact computing@calvin.edu.