The hierarchical nature of QDL makes it well-suited for representing genealogical information. The "parent" post describes the familial parent, and the sub-posts describe the children. Once a child post has been created under one of the parents, a link to it should be pasted into the post for the other parent (if known). This way, the same information will be accessible from either place.

 

But since QDL wasn't specifically designed to handle just genealogies, and therefore allows you to do things that a genealogical system wouldn't allow, we should have some conventions.

 

The first level under the main "Genealogies" post is just for surnames. If your surname is not already listed, add it by clicking the Add Surname button. If your surname is already there, but your branch of the family is not already represented, you can add the earliest ancestor in your branch directly under the surname. If there is an existing branch that is actually a descendant of the branch that you're creating, you should link it into your branch at the appropriate place, and PM the owner of that branch to say that the top level link can be cut, as that branch now appears in its correct position under your branch. Likewise, if your branch is a descendant of a branch already in there, you should add it to the existing branch. If you don't have rights, you should PM the owner of the branch with a link to your branch, and ask that it be added. Then you can manage your branch as you would any other hierarchy in QDL.

 

By default, genealogy posts begin with an HTML list. The first item should be the birth of the person, and of course the last item should be the death. Significant events, such as marriages, children, etc., should be added to this list in chronological order. Always include dates, even if they are approximate. Substitute a question mark for any numeral in the date that is not known. For example, ???? means we really have no idea when this happened, while 17?? means that it happened sometime in the 1700s.

 

The title of child posts should not list the born~died dates. These are automatically prepended to the title, on the basis of the born/died dates in the list.

 

By default, any post created under a genealogical post is itself another genealogical post. It will get a default born~died list on creation, and it will get an Add Child button when it is submitted. Then the parent post should be edited, to move it into the list in the appropriate sequence.

 

If you want to create posts that do not actually represent children, you should create them elsewhere (such as in your Sandbox) and then paste the links into the parent posts. (Just make sure that you set the rights accordingly if you do it that way.) Alternatively, you can create a "child" post for a non-person (such as a long anecdote), and then edit the properties of that post to designate it as not a child. To do this:

• Click the Action Menu icon (), and next to the Metadata option (), click edit.
• In the Data Type section, change the sub-post button to something other than Add Child.
• Click Submit.

Then there won't be any confusion as to what is a child and what is an article included in a genealogical record. Also, do not create sub-posts to divide up the major events in somebody's life, such as sub-posts to group children by different marriages. This would make the sub-posts look like children, and the actual children look like grand-children, making it difficult to keep the generations straight. So there should be only one list containing all of the major events, including children, marriage(s), birth, death, etc.

 

If a person died without children, you can turn off the Add Child button, because if they didn't have any children before they died, they probably aren't going to, ever. But leave the "add post" button set to Add Child, since this identifies this post as a genealogical record.

• Click the Action Menu icon (), and next to the Metadata option (), click edit.
• In the Data Type section, check the hide the "add post" button box.
• Click Submit.

Dates should be expressed in the ISO 8601 format (yyyy-mm-dd), and are assumed to be Julian up to (but not including) 1582, and Gregorian thereafter. During the transition from the Julian to Gregorian calendars (1582~1923), if you want to show the Julian date, add it inside parentheses after the Gregorian date, such as: (yyyy-mm-dd O.S.). Other types of date modifiers should also be set in parentheses, such as + for after, - for before, ~ for about, etc. Dates are assumed to be in the "current era" (i.e., CE, or AD in the Christian tradition), and need not be explicitly specified as such. Dates before 1 CE can more easily be specified simply as negative numbers (e.g., -44 instead of 44 BCE). This, of course, implies that time spans from BCE to CE can be found by simple subtraction, which is not the case, since there is no 0 CE or 0 BCE. The first day after Dec. 31, 1 BCE was Jan. 1, 1 CE, and time spans by subtraction require 2 years to be added.

 

When mentioning places, specify place names by copying the name from the Places hierarchy, instead of just typing the place name. This will unambiguously identify the place, without the possibility of typographical errors, and in a way that makes it possible to correlate information associated with the same place. This also gives people a link that will take them to a map of the place, if they're not sure where it is.

 

Wherever possible, cite the source of the information. Solitary sources might be described in the item itself, whereas sources that appear frequently in a group of records might be better represented as QDL Citations.

 

Please remember that living persons generally don't like for their personally-identifying information to appear on the Internet, so the family trees should not be extended all of the way into the present. If they are, the rights should be set such that only the people within the family group can see the information.