So, this is going to be left field. Over the weekend, I had a little scare. My daughter asked me about our ancestors last year and so we set about to create a family tree. Asked lots of relatives for names, dates, photos, etc. We were able to piece about 120 people together along with two essays my sister in law wrote back in school about her grandmothers life.
Anyway, this weekend I tried to open the family tree in the app we used and it was no longer available on the app store. Only a newer version that I would have to pay €50 for. I managed to get an old copy running after all and immediately went for the export options. No human readable format, only something called GEDCOM, which seems to be the accepted genealogy format.
So to avoid myself the pain in the future I spent the rest of the weekend creating a GEDCOM to Obsidian Markdown exporter.
I will create an index file of all people, create one note per person, extract all the media and link everything up properly. And as cherry on top it also creates a Canvas file for a “proper” family tree visual. The Canvas export is not perfect, but good enough for my purposes.
So now I have my whole family tree as Markdown in Obsidian and am very happy about that.
Since this was a single purpose script and I have my family exported I am more or less done with it. But I thought maybe someone else might find value in it.
Here are a few visuals:
Interstingly the A’s all come with missing family names, so I don’t really have to blur things here. 🙂
The canvas even includes images where available:
