HRE, History Research Environment, is a Java-based replacement or sequel (depending on how you look at it) to The Master Genealogist, complete with the blessing of Bob Velke, the original TMG developer. One interesting thing about HRE is that it’s not just a genealogical program (open source no less), but is meant to help with history and cultural research in general, whether that be a location (archaeology) or a group of people or even animals and plants. You can read more about that aspect here.
There was a December newsletter sent out, and here is what they mentioned, if you are following along.
As we look back over the year, we see that the inclusion of the processes and structure to add and edit people into the database has gone really well. After all, once the TMG data had been imported, the database has to be able go beyond that seed. Because HRE is designed to be used for many history research purposes, it is important to maintain some flexibility in structures, and that has made testing a bit more difficult but leaves the software open to future extensions.
However, we released a version of HRE including all Person and Event add/edit/delete functions to the Alpha test group in October, with several further test versions released to them as issues were resolved, ending in early November.Our current focus is on cleaning up all the remaining issues exposed by this test phase as well as addressing the many requests for improvements and enhancements that came from the testers.
A MAC version has been released to testers, and the bug discoveries are being worked through. After that is completed we will address the final TMG import phase for Sources, Citations and Repositories.
In November, there was an HRE development status presented at the RUG (Roots Users Group) meeting, and you can access it here: https://www.rootsusers.org/ under ‘RUG Meeting Presentations’
You can follow along with the code on GitHub here:
https://github.com/History-Research-Environment/HRE–History-Research-Environment
I have not had the time to try and build it from the source code and see how it runs, but even if you don’t want to get that deep into it, you can view the GitHub page and see what their roadmap looks like.