Hirtius – An Online Historical Research Assistant

I’ve been updating software lists of genealogy software to put on this website, and also looking at online genealogical software (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, Gigatrees, webTrees, Humo-genealogy, etc.) for a project that I need to revamp (right now it’s a genealogical database built on TNG, but I need a little bit more functionality).

The project is organizing the contents of a collection of notes, land deeds, and a couple of books with simple genealogical information on a thousand+ individuals and making it available online. The information is from (and was published in) the 1880s and 1890s, so the genealogical standards differ a lot from what we are used to here in 2024 (Elizabeth Shown Mills would not be a fan of the original data and how little is properly sourced!) In regard to this site, it’s (mostly) not going to be an “active” genealogy research website that people will contribute to over time, as I’ve made the decision that I want to freeze a part of the site to preserve the context of the information from the 19th century, and not bring in a lot of new/corrected/updated information that’s been developed since that time and kind of muddy the waters. If somebody looks at that part of the site, at that genealogical information, they’ll be looking at a snapshot from the 1880s/1890s.

With that said, I plan on having an active portion of the website for people to contribute information that’s been learned/researched since the 1890s (maybe linked to the 1800s entries), since a fair share of the 1800s information is slightly inaccurate or at least lacking in places. My initial plan was to have something like TNG with WordPress integration (WordPress is a CMS – Content Management System), basically a blog wrapped around a genealogical database/family tree system, but that can be slow and more complex at times to have two complex systems integrated (although some have done it beautifully – see https://www.kloosterman.be/genealogy-eng/). It’s been my experience that it’s easier to run the two separately (although you are maintaining two databases and two sets of login credentials if you keep them separate), and I have multiple family trees online with TNG and webtrees (and need to try Gigatrees), and I won’t change those – this is a unique case. I also looked at Joomla and Drupal, two other CMSes.

Then I came across Hirtius, a Historical Research Assistant, which is a web-based system developed by Les Ateliers du Heron. The project description sums it up:

Its goal is to replace the historian's notebook and
box of cards, while providing a collaborative work environment for a
whole team of researchers, that can be thought of as a purpose-built CMS
cross-bred with a digital pictures management system, a genealogy
application and a Wiki.

Eventually, based on the information you stored in the application, and
the links you created between the various data elements, Hirtius will
also help you prepare the draft version of your scholarly papers.

Hirtius intrigues me a great deal. It’s a CMS focused on photos, a wiki, and a genealogy application, all in one CMS! The bit about preparing draft versions of scholarly papers is interesting as well, as that might help assemble a family history book (or some variation).

It is focused on academic projects and it leans way into the historical record – one example is a calendar with Romand dating showing the year 44 BCE (Julian era) – none of us have named relatives going back that far that we can verify!

The feature list is impressive, as it contains:

• A wiki
• Metadata-based digital image asset management
• Genealogy – family relationships for individuals (“basic genealogy” is the way the website describes it)
• Bibliographical and source references for all object types
• Attachment support for all object types
• User-defined hierarchical index to structure data
• Full-text/advanced search mode
• System to organize work and help with drafting scholarly papers.

From reading the documentation (https://hirtius.sourceforge.io/docs/help/00_TOC.html), this its clearly not meant to replace something as fully-featured as TNG, webtrees, Gigatrees, Humo, etc. – it won’t function as your desktop genealogy program replacement unlike those. You can see what it can do with a look at the Individuals Management Workflow (page here). For my project there’s not a lot of complex genealogical data on the people involved- it’s mostly BMD information. The wiki part and the photo management is very appealing to me, as I have a lot of information that might not be attached to a specific individual, or it’s information I don’t want to bury in a note attached to an individual record.

I’m going to take a look at it, and maybe put up a demo of what I’m working on sometime in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, there are some official screenshots at the bottom of the page, and you can read more about it at the links below. The requirements are the same as most of the software I mentioned above:

• Apache 2.4 or above (or most likely similar)
• PHP 7.0 (5.3.0 or above *should* work)
• MySQL or mariaDB databases

The official home page is here: https://hirtius.sourceforge.io/

The project page is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hirtius/