I’d always been dissatisfied with the limitations of whichever otherwise excellent genealogy program I was using. Finally, I decided to write my own. One of the requirements was that it fully support Unicode—the “Uni” in “UniGen.” Another was that it be web-based, to allow people to work together—hey, “Uni” also stands for United! Finally, I didn’t want my web-based program to prevent someone from updating info on their own children just because they were still living.

About the time I started to face the fact that I just don't have the time to write my own, I discovered that PhpGedView (PGV) already meets all three of these requirements.  But I had already purchased the name “UniGen.us,” so I decided to keep it.  By the way, membership is not restricted to the USA—it’s just that .net, .org, and .com were already taken.)

How does UniGen and PhpGedView meet these requirements?

  • Unicode is a system that allows a single document or database to mix text from almost any language in use today or in the past.  Using it here means that we can correctly spell Łancut, Géneviève, Châtigny, and even 孔夫子 (Kǒng Fūzǐ)—no, he’s not related.
  • Privacy vs. Access: When a UniGen account is created, the account is also linked to the owner’s record in the database.  This makes it possible to automatically grant access for that person to his or her close relatives yet still provide proper privacy protection from other persons.  The PhpGedView term for this is “relationship privacy.”
  • Web-based collaboration: If you are related to someone in this database, please consider requesting an account and helping out.