My uncle has been doing genealogical research for over 20 years now and has 130k individuals in the db. He uses The Master Genealogist (TMG) running under Wine

My uncle has been doing genealogical research for over 20 years now and has 130k individuals in the db. He uses The Master Genealogist (TMG) running under Wine (Windows gave up a long time ago). TMG ceased development some time ago but it was written by someone who really knew their genealogy but not so hot on the programming/db front. It is FoxPro based and a bit odd. However, I can get at all the data via Libre Office so at least the data is safe for the future - even as just a set of tables. If you ever get into genealogy you will discover GEDCOM as the lingua franca. It is/was a file format developed by the Mormons. It is a bit idiosyncratic but at least it is a standard and still developed. The CofJC&LDS (Mormons) have their own reasons for getting into genealogy and they are probably not your reasons. However it is a standard and it works pretty well. You can always overload notes fields for your purposes. We are currently settled on Geneweb as the presentation medium for the data in TMG. Geneweb is written in OCAML and I am learning OCAML as a sideline. GW is very, very fast at some calcs and reports and a bit weird in general. It will be a while before I can request a git pull. I've slapped Privacy Idea on the front to secure it. My personal favourite self hosted app is webtrees. It's a LAMP jobbie and well supported. Go for that, if you are starting out. Now, one of the biggest issues you face in genealogy is what to record and even how to get that data. Be very careful how you approach the living. Human relationships are frankly rather messy and memories can be rather malleable, documentation can be wrong or illegible and so on. So your recording system has to be rather flexible. Ideally you assign a confidence score to each fact, event, anecdote or whatever. Me and my Uncle have decided on a policy of "as close to actually happened, as possible or redact and note as such, unless the object has a hissie fit". So if your fictional aunt does not want her second boyfriend of 10 years noted, then an entry is made without a name, if she gets really unhappy about it then remove the record altogether - the living get to decide what you record about them. That brings me around to another issue: Significant relationships - what to record and why: What are they? Marriages only? Nope. Also note that the notion of sexuality and sex are rather more nuanced these days than they were. Genealogy needs to keep apace with real life. What genealogy really, really needs is not another website. It needs some clever kids who understand the subject matter and can come up with a decent data schema - perhaps by modifying GEDCOM. This is data that needs to be textual and ideally self describing. It needs to work in 500 years time. Help!!!