Roy Blackmore is a pensioner from Taunton, Somerset. He was orphaned as a child when his parent died in 1931. He was fostered along with three of his six brothers. He is now claiming a world record for the largest documented family tree.
He started researching his family tree 1980 and now has a family tree of
9.390 individuals that includes William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great and
stretches back to the Cerdick family in 500 JC. The also includes the French
Royal family and Hugh Capet.
Creating this tree took 28 years and some £ 20.000.
A large part of that cost is travel expenses. A lot of press claims that he performed his research before the Internet, but that is not right. Back in 1980, the Internet was already more than a decade old, but few outside academic circles had access to it, and the world-wide web did not exist yet. Mr Blackmore researched his tree by travelling the country to visit archives and study the birth, marriage, death, cemetery and census records.
Mr Blackmore has applied to the Guinness Book of records to claim the world’s largest documented family tree. Sensationalist press is already misrepresenting his claim as the largest family tree ever, but that is not what he is claiming at all. He is not claiming a tree of 9.390 ancestors and relatives is the largest family tree ever, many have larger databases already. He is claiming that it is the largest documented family tree. He spent up to five hours a day to create and document his tree from primary sources.
I still doubt that his accomplishment constitutes a record. The largest family tree I know of is the descendants of Confucius; it includes more than 2 million people, and that sure isn’t without any documentation.
Most desktop software will have little problem handling a moderately-sized database of some 10.000 individuals. I wouldn’t recommend resource-hungry programs like GenoPro 2007 and WinFamily or slow programs like Family Tree Maker and The Master Genealogist.
The real question is not whether these programs can handle a tree of moderate size, but whether they can handle the accompanying 10.000 documents that back it up.
For a lot of web software, even small trees of just a few thousand individuals are too much. A lot of this software is build using PHP or Flash, which are both notoriously slow technologies. When Geni.com, which uses Flash, introduced its GEDCOM import, it would only accept small files containing less than 5000 individuals.
Some desktop programs, such as Heredis and Hereditree, have weak support for sources, but many web programs do not support sources at all.
A few programs that would handle this database fairly well are PAF, RootsMagic and Legacy.
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