#Tiny Tafel
A good question. "Tiny Tafel" is a bit of a corruption of "Ahnentafel", a
German word meaning "ancestor table".
An ahnentafel is a method of listing a person's ancestors. In it, a rather
formal numbering structure is used, but all the text is variable. Ahnentafels
have been used by genealogists for well over 100 years. For an example of
one, download BUSH2.ANC from Library 2, it's an ahnentafel of 200 or so of
President Bush's ancestors.
A couple of years ago, a method was established of exchanging surnames of
interest between microcomputers, especially computers of differing types. This
is a stripped-down version of an Ahnentafel, listing only the surnames of
interests, the range of years and the geographic locations. It does not list
individuals. The format of a this file is very rigid, every character and
line must conform exactly so that the receiving microcomputer may interpret
the data correctly. Since this was an ahnentafel reduced in size, it was
nicknamed "Tiny Tafel". The tiny tafel format is supported by the Roots-3
genealogy program for MS-DOS systems. There are also utilities available for
other programs/computers.
There's a file in Library 7 that explains Tiny Tafels in detail. If you are
interested, go there and download TTSPEC.DOC.
– Dick