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I am a part-time Tutor in Combined Studies at the University of
Nottingham. In 2006-2007 I researched and taught a third-year undergraduate
module The History of the Family in England, 1200-1900. Genopro was
an excellent teaching aid for producing diagrams illustrating feudal
marriage alliances, subdivision of peasant landholdings, step-families and
affective kinship. Its versatile and colourful charts are particularly
useful for visual learners. Families are (and have always been) complex
structures interlocking with other communities and kin groups, and Genopro
is the first genealogical software to acknowledge this and allow visual
presentation of the wider context in which biological families live or
lived.
Mediaeval English people recognized relationships with a wide circle of
their blood relatives (“kindred”), their “affinity”, including relatives by
marriage and by baptism (“spiritual kin”); they had “feudal” relationships
with manorial lords or Patrons, and were pledged to the good behaviour of
all their neighbours in the same township or tithing. The better-off had
friendships forged through their education together at public schools and
Inns of Court, and complex business relationships with their lawyers and
trustees. At last, in Genopro, genealogists and historians can represent all
these relationships visually and with rich underlying content.
I am currently preparing courses on Kinship and the History of Marriage
and anticipate regular use of Genopro to explain their complexities through
real-life case studies. Clients for whom I have carried out research
projects have been pleased with Genopro charts showing my discoveries; early
genealogy often involves degrees of uncertainty, and Genopro provides
excellent customisable graphics to distinguish firm facts from tentative
theories. Since the launch of Genopro 2007 I have been able to share
information, maps and family trees online in “real time”, and this has
revolutionized my work.
Peter Foden
Professional Genealogist, Tutor and Freelance Archivist
Nottinghamshire, England
www.Ancestrography.co.uk
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