What is a chosen family?
A chosen family is a combination of biological and nonbiological kith and kinship bonds, whether legally recognized or not, deliberately chosen for the purpose of mutual support and love.
Your chosen family may be your biological family. Maybe with a godparent thrown in. Your chosen family may be a large, extended family consisting of in-laws, ex-in-laws that you still share a bond with. Your chosen family may be your friends that you rely upon.
Regardless of the structure, biological nature, or size of your family, you deserve a tool to document, view, and share it.
This is an inclusive, open-source alternative to GEDCOM for family trees and genealogical information.
- Track biological/genealogical data as well as your "chosen family", including godparents, partners, etc.
- Inclusive gender/pronoun support and a wide range of living rangements
- Support for blended families, in-laws, divorces, multiple partners, guardianships, adoptions, and step-and-half siblings.
Data is stored as JSON.
Included in this proposed standard are basic graph support (Using Cypher).
- Basic transformation of family JSON data into network graph.
- Automatically add inferred relationships
- For example, if you enter your spouse and children, sibling relationships will be inferred.
- Automatically generate the proper named relationship between any two members of a graph.
- Support for multiple languages
- Customizable named relationship data (If you want to call "an aunt" "a titi")
- Generating standard "family tree" views.
The defacto standard for tracking genealogical data was made in the mid-90's by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
I personally find some of the beliefs and standards of the LDS church to lack inclusivity, compassion, and openness to modern family structures.
This is a project I am working on because I didn't find any solid alternative. Please let me know if you want to contribute OR if you find a solid alternative.
Once I have a standardized format for language support, I would appreciate help with adding translations of relationships in multiple languages.