What is Clooz?

You're probably familiar with other genealogy software programs. You enter the names and pertinent information about people in your family, and based on their relationships to one another, build Real estate or buildings is a Subject type in Clooz. This could be any type of property: land plot, farm, building, etc. a family tree. As you are building this family tree you need to be looking at lots of documents and drawing conclusions about their relevance. Is the person in a particular document the correct person you are looking for? Inserting people into your family tree without first performing this analysis makes your effort error prone. If you are following the best practices in family history research, you are gathering all the information you can find. But often you end up with piles of paper, notes, image files, and thousands of "hints" provided by your favorite online data source A source record in Clooz should be viewed as the higher level components of a source citation. Citation details are pulled from the citing Information Record.. It can all be quite overwhelming. Here is where Clooz enters the picture.

Clooz is designed to support your research efforts by serving as a repository Where a source document or item was found. This could be a physical library facility or online data provider. for all the information you discover and believe may be of some value to you in your research. In Clooz, it doesn't really matter whether the people included in that information end up in your family tree or not, in fact family trees aren't even something it provides. That's not its focus. It is used to help you keep track of what you are searching for, maintain the information you find and index it to provide a way to easily retrieve it later. It's an alternative to sticky notes and piles of papers, folders and binders. Information Records Information Records in Clooz hold the content information coming from a document or other source. These differ from a Source record that contains most of the citation information describing the docment, or the Repository record referring to the facility or online service where the document was found. are the core of Clooz. There is very little you can document about a person in Clooz without first creating an Information Record. It is for that reason Clooz is considered to have an evidence-based approach. If you are attempting to research your family accurately through examination of real evidence, then Clooz is for you.

Flexibility is one of the design goals of Clooz. There are usually multiple ways of performing the same ultimate objective. Good software should provide you the capabilities to do things the way you work, not force you to adapt your work flow to what the program needs. Some users are meticulous about entering all the details from each Information Source in order to get maximum benefit, others might be using Clooz as an evidence-first way of updating their family tree software, and still others might be just wanting to use Clooz for its data organization and indexing capabilities. It's all up to you. In any case, Clooz supplements the other family-tree based software programs; it does not replace them.