Original author(s) | Written in C | |
Developer(s) Larry Hamilton and the LifeLines Team Initial release 23 September 1992; 24 years ago (1992-09-23) Stable release 3.1.1 / 17 March 2016; 11 months ago (2016-03-17) Operating system | ||
LifeLines is a free open-source genealogy software tool to assist family history research. LifeLines primary strengths are its powerful scripting language and the ability to easily import and export information in the GEDCOM format. It was the first open-source genealogy program for Unix. The Lifelines scripting language is now supported by several other open-source programs.
History
Lifelines version 1.0 was written by Tom Wetmore in the fall and winter of 1990/91 for his private use. Lifelines version 2.0 was released 23 September 1992 to the public. Lifelines version 3.0 was released 12 October 1994.
Lifelines was maintained by a team of volunteers. Work on it seemed to be discontinued, but it continued to be available in the Debian distribution of Linux and its descendants such as Ubuntu. In April 2016 it received a new lease of life when the code was moved to GitHub and a new release numbered 3.1.0 was issued.
LifeLines uses a text-based curses interface. A couple of experimental GUI interfaces were in development, but lacked the stability and core functionality to make them suitable for release.