Recently I’ve started to become concerned about my genealogy software. I’ve used the same software for over 20 years and I really like it. But it’s made by a small, family-run company, and it really hasn’t evolved very much over that timeframe. I’ve become more and more concerned that at some point it will shut down when the family has retired or just decides the effort is no longer worth it. I’m not naming the software because I’m not trying to fault them, and it really has been one of my favorite apps for a couple decades. I was already thinking about this potential end-of-life issue when a similar issue arose with Nisus Writer, and that pushed me over the edge to being proactive about this.

Recently I’ve been processing a number of family history photos or scans of old family artifacts such as letters. For images that are historic which I may share or distribute as a part of my research, I want to be sure that I have a good citation for the image and I want to embed it in the image itself so that the sourcing information is less likely to be lost as the image gets distributed or passed around. I started off using Pixelmator Pro to painstakingly add text citations to the images, but this seemed arduous and somewhat inconsistent after a while, and if I needed to tweak the citation it got a bit fiddly.

I’ve been using Advantage Archives for looking at the newspaper archives of a number of different libraries as a part of genealogy research.

The trouble is that each library has a slightly different UI for browsing these newspapers, and the experience can be fairly cumbersome. Ultimately, you can download a PDF if you want, but all the clicking around still makes the process slow and frustrating.

Of course the built-in MacOS Preview tool can show you PDFs, too, and it’s navigation/zoom interface is easier, too (especially using pinch-to-zoom, etc).

In my research I’ve been finding a lot of newspaper articles and transcribing them using automation. But when I’m documenting those articles and linking them to people, I also need to create a source citation. I try to use Evidence Explained-style citations to the best of my ability, but there’s a lot of repeated boilerplate text when writing these up – and there is formatting! Some parts of italicized, so that gets tedious, too.

I recently discovered a trove of online newspaper archives for an region where a branch of my family research is focused. Advantage Archives partners with mostly small-town libraries, especially in the midwestern USA, to digitize old newspaper archives and put them online.

The discovery of all these newpaper archives has led me to want to transcribe and write source citations for hundreds of articles. You know what’s tedious? Transcribing and citing hundreds of articles! This is a job for automation!

Welcome to Pedigree Pipeline, a place for me to share tips and techniques for automating genealogy and family history research — along with other insights or discoveries from my research itself. Much of my work is computer-centric these days, and I often find myself repeating the same tasks. As a software engineer, I’m always thinking about how to automate these workflows — primarily on a Mac, using the Unix command line and Mac-centric automation tools.