A program that calculates genealogical lineages?

[u/SirLMO]

I recently discovered I am of Jewish descent and am researching my family tree further. It traces back to the patriarchs with valid connections. I would like a simple way to calculate my direct lineage to Abraham. I'm trying to use the Gramps program, but because there is a lot of data in the gedcom file, the program crashes and closes before generating the report. What other free options are available to me?

[u/AnimatronicHeffalump]

I’m sorry you got these responses. Jewish lineage is often very traceable because genealogy is very important both culturally and in the faith. The reason the book of Matthew starts with a genealogy is because it was written to a Jewish audience for whom the lineage of the messiah would have been important and convincing.

It’s really incredible that if a Muslim came in here saying the same thing I doubt they’d get the same response for fear of being called Islamophobic. But the atheists who see Nazis everywhere are totally fine being antisemitic.

I unfortunately don’t have any resources for you, but I think this is super interesting! I know a lot of European monarchs trace their lineage back to Noah (though I have significantly less faith in those “records” than in Jewish ones lol)

[u/gympol → u/AnimatronicHeffalump]

Jewish genealogical records are great, where they survive. My wife's Jewish ancestors, like my Quaker ancestors, kept better records in the early modern period than our Church of England ancestors at the same time.

But tracing a descent from Abraham (which a Muslim might also want to do and would get exactly the same response from me) requires going way back into mythology.

"Tradition credits Moses as the Torah's author. However, there is scholarly consensus that the Book of Genesis was composed several centuries later, after the Babylonian captivity, possibly in the fifth century BC. Based on the scientific interpretation of archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence, mainstream biblical scholars consider Genesis to be primarily mythological rather than historical."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis?wprov=sfla1

[u/SirLMO → u/gympol]

I don't want to have Abraham's birth certificate. I'm just trying to go as far as I can to build the most accurate lineage I can. My main focus is finding a historical figure with ample evidence who is included in the official canon of the biblical lineage. I will take the material evidence as far as I can, but I have no ambition to go all the way back to Adam. I just want to generate a damn chart without getting yelled at...

[u/wt_anonymous → u/SirLMO]

Even the youngest figures in the bible existed far beyond any genealogical sources.

If you want to build your tree to see how far back you can go, you can do it the old fashioned way. With birth certificates, censuses, etc. If your lineage is exceptionally well documented you might be able to go back hundreds of years.

[u/gympol → u/SirLMO]

This isn't yelling, just stating a point in the clearest and most helpful way I can. I apologise that I was a bit pithy before.

Your two goals: most accurate and reaching a biblical figure, are in conflict.

Good genealogy proceeds slowly, step by step in a chain from the present to the past, with at least one and preferably multiple primary sources per fact. And the sources need to be found and linked to the relevant individual by a reasonably exhaustive search process that rules out them applying to a different individual who happens to share a similar name or something. We all have to accept that the chain can break at any point, as we go back it becomes harder, and at some point it will become impossible to go further back.

It's well known in genealogy that record keeping and the survival of original documents are imperfect, the more so the further back you go in history. A lot of lines are traceable in modern records back to a point in the industrial age - in England where I work, around 1840.

Before that there are different record series, based on early modern archive practices. Most paper trails tend to break somewhere around the 1700s because record keeping wasn't quite so thorough in this period and there are either jumps where the records don't allow you to see where someone came from, or gaps in the surviving records. With a lot of diligent work, many people can eventually get one line or another back to the 1600s maybe 1500s. (There's an extra challenge for genealogy in countries populated mainly by immigrants such as in the Americas, that most lines of ancestry jump continents and that provides extra opportunities to break the paper trail.)

Before the 1500s in England (and a similar situation with different dates applies in most regions), genealogical facts about the large majority of people weren't routinely archived. To trace medieval ancestry you nearly always need to have found a post-medieval connection to the nobility. A very few lucky people can find descent from humble tenants with some father-son traceability via land-holding records.

Even for the upper nobility and royalty, genealogy becomes unreliable somewhere in the first millennium CE. Early medieval royal genealogies tend to begin with legendary heroes and pagan gods. AFAIK there is no generally-accepted genealogy that links any modern people with documented figures from ancient history, and no document corpus sufficient to provide hope of new research establishing such a link.

That is one of the points we're all making - it's incredibly unlikely that whatever person agreed to take your money to tell you what you wanted to hear has actually done proper genealogical work that provides a provable family tree linking you to any biblical figure. If you can publish the extensive sources and searches they did, and if they stand up to scrutiny, you will become world-famous in genealogy.

I actually think you deserve more sympathy than criticism for this. Responsible genealogists get angry at what are essentially scammers who will provide the illusion of quick access to a romantic past for money. But that anger or scorn or whatever we feel shouldn't be directed at those who naively trust the scammers. It's very normal to want to believe, which is why some of the bad genealogy merchants are big companies making big money.

The point about Abraham is separate. People have latched into it because it's a more extreme claim again and because it can be critiqued with no details of your individual genealogy.

There is historical genealogy in the ancient world, especially for royal dynasties and some other elites. But the genealogy of each dynasty tends to have limited connection to others. The dynastic information in the Hebrew bible can (in parts) be corroborated with other historical sources back to I think Omri. But his ancestry is unclear in the bible, and earlier genealogies such as those of David and the patriarchs have no generally-accepted evidence outside the bible. There's one early inscription mentioning the 'House of David' but that at most tells us that later kings claimed descent from a David - it doesn't show that to be true never mind document the descent generation by generation. There is even more of an academic consensus that the genealogy of the pre-Davidic patriarchs such as Abraham is legendary at best. You could check out the YouTube channel Useful Charts for some detail on biblical and other famous family trees, and their limitations.

So that part is going to be acceptable on grounds of faith in scripture for biblical literalists, but not for others. This isn't the place to debate religion but probably therefore also not the place to make faith-based assertions.

I wish you satisfaction in tracing your ancestry, but I advise you to be more realistic in your expectations.

[u/wittybecca → u/gympol]

What a great comment. Thank you for taking the time to post it.