Using TNG to create an index

[Paul Barrett]

Hello hive mind - I have a question for you.  It's a bit off piste.

The family history society I volunteer for has, over 50 years, transcribed millions of BMD records.  We make a cut down version of these available through Findmypast but we also publish them ourselves in various formats - CD, PDF downloads and ePubs - as collections of records for parishes.

We need to create a searchable index that will direct a customer to the product that will contain the records they are looking for.

So if they need to see records relating to John Smith born about 1790 in the parish of Fyfield, they do a search, find that we have records that could potentially be the ones they're looking for, and see a link to the item in our shop that they can buy.  That last bit is easy because a note with a hypelink will do the job,

There is no need to create any kind of familial links.  Effectively each entry is an unattached person.  And a person's B, M and D records would all be independent of each other - resulting in three separate people records.

The source data is available in spreadsheets and I can use the 'Flexible CSV importer' plugin to import the files into Family Historian from where I can export a GEDCOM for import into TNG.  I've done a small test and that works

The reason I'm contemplating this is TNG has the data structure to handle this and the search capabilities including Soundex and Metaphone are all there.

The question is, am I being realistic or not?

We're not in a position to offer a full record search and display - we can only direct people to a CD, PDF or ePub that may contain the records - too complicated to explain.  So we 'just' need an index

I'd appreciate any feedback, good or bad!

 

TIA

Paul

[reubiolo1]

interesting information