Querying the MacFamilyTree Database

October 21, 2026 | Comment

WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!

A while back I found an online course called SQL for Genealogy which taught you how to extract and manipulate your family history data using SQL queries. I was, and still am, using a program called MacFamilyTree to record my research but that doesn’t have a published schema for its database so I transferred all data via GEDCOM to Roots Magic and used that instead. You can read more about that here in the post below but I wanted to revisit getting the data directly from MacFamilyTree (MFT). … Read the rest

Go to a Specific Date in DayOne

May 20, 2026 | Comment

I’ve written about directly accessing the Day One database before along with a number of posts about getting data in from other services.

This week I came across a niggle with the Day One Mac app in that you cannot go directly to a specific dated post just by typing the date you want. You can scroll through the calendar and you can filter by year but that’s about it.

Rolling Your Own

As usual, I wasn’t willing to accept this deficiency, so I decided to build something to get around it.

The app consists of three files:

  • a
… Read the rest

Storing Data in a PHP Project

October 15, 2025 | 1 comment

Over the last year I have been reevaluating how and were I store the data for my projects. Traditionally I have added a new database in MySQL for each but I thought that was a bit overkill for some of the smaller, single user, projects that I was working on.

There are several options for storing your data, but each comes with its own trade-offs in setup time, performance, and scalability. Here I look at the ones I have used in my prejects — flat files, SQLite, and MySQL — and see where each one shines (and where … Read the rest

Family History Database Searches

May 1, 2025 | 1 comment

Amongst all my many hobbies is researching my family history, which I have been doing on and off (well, more off actually) for the last 30 years. Over that time, how you research has changed enormously with so many records now being available online. Also, when I first started, the only way to record your information was on paper, but now there are numerous software packages that have largely replaced the need for paper.

Data Mining

The main issue with recording your family history information in a software package is that you are beholden to the developer’s choice of what … Read the rest

Querying the Day One Database

June 14, 2023 | 1 comment

WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!

Why do it?

I have been using the Day One journaling app to keep a daily personal diary for many years now. I have been recording my mundane thoughts there for over seven years and have transcribed five paper diaries too giving me a total of 14 year held there.

That’s currently 4,267 entries and counting of which I know very little about other than the text itself. I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in … Read the rest