Genealogy Explorer (GeneExplorer) is a complete genealogy database system that is scalable from a small family to millions of entries.  These web pages are tied directly to the database maintained by Gregory J. Marsh.

History

One day in 1984, Greg was having lunch in the Pentagon cafeteria when an idea struck. The idea was how to make a very fast and small relational database to track his interest in Genealogy.  That program became GeneMaster. GeneMaster ran on a PC in DOS, but was as graphical as any program of the day and was extremely fast. Greg still maintains that GeneMaster database in a DOS window in Windows XP. Starting in 1994, Greg began working to make GeneMaster a Windows program. The shortage of available time and other factors kept the Windows version of GeneMaster from being released publicly. In 2002 he realized that by leveraging the web, SQL server, and modern Windows programming, he could finally produce something better than the original GeneMaster, and GeneExplorer was born.

Current Technical Overview

GeneExplorer consists of several parts. The database itself is either Microsoft's SQL Server 2000, or the Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE).  The full client is a Win32 program (similar to the Windows Explorer).  The web interface today is a read-only interface written in Microsoft's ASP.NET. Since the full client and web interface can simultaneously access the data, no extra effort or software is required to publish the data to a Microsoft Web Server (IIS).

Planned Technical Overview

Several major initiatives are planned:

• A full web-based client.
• A public "free for all" database. The basic idea is to determine how well people interested in Genealogy can interact to build a major database. There are some very large databases in the world today, but none will allow anyone to add, delete, and change all data.