Sankethi Family Tree

The Sankethi community is collaborating on a Family Tree project to develop an evolving record of who we have been, who we are, and who we will be. It's a unique learning opportunity that can be carried forward to future generations.

Family Tree Web Site: http://sankethi.ourroots.info
Family Tree Editors: sankethi_family_tree@googlegroups.com
Family Tree Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/g/sankethi_family_tree

Guiding Principles

People

The family tree will be publicly accessible, and any information submitted should be considered in that light. It will be extremely difficult to guarantee any meaningful restriction of the data, even if we wanted to do so.
Anyone (living) should be able to personally opt-out of the family tree. We should include as many historic people as possible, unless there is a compelling reason not to.
People should be able to selectively share as little or as much about themselves as they feel comfortable (e.g. some people may not want to share their email address, etc).
Individuals should be considered the most authoritative source for their data, followed by their closest family members, and so on.
Data on non-Sankethis who marry Sankethis (and their descendents) can be included, but to keep the data set practically bounded, the family and ancestors of non-Sankethis will not be maintained locally in the Sankethi Family Tree. Pointers can be provided to other family trees as available.

Process

Initially, we will have a small number of editors to update the family tree.
Long-term, the process should be distributed/delegated as much as possible, where Sankethis anywhere in the world can update data for which they are the most authoritative/knowledgable.

Technology

The family tree should be easily browseable/searchable over the Internet.
The underlying database itself should be available on the Internet in an open standards-based format. Currently, GEDCOM is the most widely accepted open standard for the exchange of Genealogical information. In the future, GEDCOM XML or other standards may become more prominent.

Contributing

The Sankethi Family Tree is an evolving work in progress. We encourage all Sankethis to review the family tree and provide corrections and additional information wherever possible. While the information provided reflects the best of our knowledge and research efforts, we recognize that there may be errors, which we regret. In particular, the spelling and order of name components are prone to ambiguity. If you write/spell your name differently than how it is listed in the family tree, or if you know of people for whom this is the case, please let us know so that we can correct the data. To contact the editors, visit this page and select Contact owners and managers: https://groups.google.com/g/sankethi_family_tree/about. You can also participate in discussions by subscribing to the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/sankethi_family_tree

Here are some guidelines for contributing to the family tree:

If you have an editor account, please refer to the editing document for instructions on how to make changes interactively
If you have bulk data that you want to contribute, please note the following guidelines:
- Provide data in GEDCOM format if possible. But don't worry if you can't -- just send whatever you can in a human-readable format.
- Provide exact dates wherever possible. But if the information is not that precise, or if there are privacy concerns, consider at least providing the year of the event, or the month and year of the event.
- Provide names formatted as the legal name in the country where the person has lived. This will mean that for some people, the given name will be written last, and for others it will be written first. Two common orderings are:
- When submitting new people to be added to the family tree, first check to see if any of them are already present -- if so, refer to the existing entry. Do not create duplicate entries.
- Provide connection information to existing persons in the family tree. If this is not possible, unlinked people can be added, but it is strongly desirable to maintain a single, connected set of relationships.
- Provide as much data as possible/relevant in the following areas: