For some time now I have been working on building a family tree - a genealogy research project if you will. What started off as a labor of love, limited in scope to include only the immediate family members, has transformed into something very large. Today it contains well over 4000 members, but yet, just a fraction of its potential to grow. From a larger perspective, it is possible to build the tree (well, not one large tree but several) that could encompass most members of the community. Though ambitious, with collaborative participation, this is an achievable goal.

The family tree database contains individual's name, birth date and place, if deceased, date and place, notable events in life, relationship with others etc. Best of all, there is a provision to include individual or family photos linked to the person(s).

As important as the numbers are, the focus is on accuracy and authenticity of every element of information that goes into forming the database. The effort is to make this a reference implementation of the community genealogy. Information must be verifiable, where possible supported by documents. At least these would be our goals. Digitized copies of these supporting documents could go into the database.

So why wait? Go and flip through the webpages. Trace your ancestors. Track your cousins. Enjoy the pleasure of viewing photographs that you never suspected existed.

If this sounds a little hollow, well, it probably is. The claims may come true when the tree takes a firm root and is in full bloom.

As a policy, to safeguard the privacy of the individuals, data of the living are limited to names only. In other words, birth dates are not published, although these are stored in the database.