God and Horses

I wanted to mention a couple of other uses of genealogy programs that are kind of interesting and fun. There are quite a few breeders of AKC dogs and championship horses that keep track of all of their pedigree information in a genealogy database program. It makes sense to do this considering not only can they keep track of the actual lineage and dates but they can also keep track of all kinds of things using the events feature such as shot records, breeding records, shows attended and the results. I am sure breeders of other types of show animals also do this.

There are also people out there that have used a genealogy database program to detail all of the people/relationships mentioned in the Bible. Now that is a task! One thing that is very helpful for these people is that the program is really good at is keeping track of AKAs as many persons in the Bible were known by more than one name such as Sarai/Sarah. You can add information in the "Title Suffix" field to help distinguish persons with the same name such as Joshua son of Nun versus Joshua son of Josedech. You can also identify all of the people with titles using the "Title Prefix" field such as King Josiah. The multiple marriages and concubine relationships are also easy to keep track of. Dates are a challenge when studying the Bible but you can record dates as well as alternate dates with explanations. You can even record dates as written such as "in the third year of his reign" or you can document using the Hebrew calendar, "even upon the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar" [13 Adar].

Maybe when I have a couple of years to spare I will do a project like this.

Copyright © 2012 Michele Simmons Lewis