Escaping the family history Behemoths ..

 I started dabbling in family history back before the pandemic, but, like many people, I signed up to one of the mega family history companies during the pandemic. It was either that or sourdough.

And, I'm not going to be rude about the experience, it was actually quite valuable in building out the family tree, but there comes a point when it turns into stamp collecting with more and more distantly related ancestors.

Now there may be interesting stories out there, but about six months ago I came to feel that the way forward was to flesh out individual stories. And more, as an exercise to keep the grey cells ticking over it is more fun to do one's own searches, rather than simply rely on a set of algorithms.

So, I've made the decision not to renew my subscription to My Heritage, and to carry on dabbling myself.

The first thing, obviously, was to get my data out of My Heritage.

This is quite easy, if a little obscure. 

Using the web interface, there's an option to 'manage family trees', and in it is an option to export to Gedcom

Gedcom is a file format for the exchange of genealogical data between genealogy programs.

Gedcom has the advantage of being a text based format, meaning (a) files can be edited or examined with a decent text editor such as Kate, and (b) it's comparatively simple to write a script in perl, or anything else that is good at text manipulation and regular expressions, to extract and reformat data as required. 

Unfortunately as the Gedcom  format was not updated between 1999 and 2019, the various commercial genealogy companies have added their own extensions for extra functionality, making each of  their Gedcom exports slightly incompatible with each other - a bit like BibTex really, in that there are a whole set of minor an irritating differences between different vendors' implementations.

However Gedcom is what we have, and so Gedcom is what we have to work with.

As a local genealogy management tool I decided to use Gramps, a free open source package. I've used it before, and it does most of what I want.

I installed it on my Kubuntu linux laptop and imported my Gedcom exports. As you would expect there were various scary warnings about unrecognised attributes, almost certainly due to unrecognised extensions, but it basically worked:

Almost all the data seems to be there. (My MyHeritage subscription does not expire until the end of the year giving me a month to sanity check the data, but on a quick skim, everything important is there.)