Graph-Based Remerging of Genealogical Databases

Computers have helped family history research tremendously, and personal genealogyprograms help people organize their information in a way not previously possible. However,most personal genealogy software packages available today suffer from weak mergingfunctionality, which makes collaboration with others much more difficult than it needs to be. Inparticular, if someone shares a copy of their electronic genealogical database with a relative, andthen both make additions and/or changes to the data, there is currently no reasonable way in mostgenealogical programs to merge these changes together. This paper reviews current approachesto this problem and presents an algorithm for taking much of the agony out of the mergingprocess by taking into account the relationships of individuals in the database.