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Genealogy-Wills-0.10
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/ Genealogy::Wills

NAME

Genealogy::Wills - Lookup in a database of wills

VERSION

Version 0.10

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a convenient interface to search through a database of historical wills, primarily focused on the Kent Wills Transcript. It handles database connections, caching, and result formatting.

- Results are cached for 1 day by default - Database connections are lazy-loaded - Large result sets may consume significant memory

SYNOPSIS

# See https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mrawson/genealogy/wills.html
use Genealogy::Wills;
my $wills = Genealogy::Wills->new();
# ...

SUBROUTINES/METHODS

new

Creates a Genealogy::Wills object.

Takes three optional arguments, which can be hash, hash-ref or key-value pairs.

  • config_file

    Points to a configuration file which contains the parameters to new(). The file can be in any common format, including YAML, XML, and INI. This allows the parameters to be set at run time.

  • directory

    That is the directory containing wills.sql. If not given, the use the module's data directory.

  • logger

    An object to send log messages to

Last (last name) is a mandatory parameter.

Return a list of hash references in list context, or a hash reference in scalar context.

Each record includes a formatted url field.

my $wills = Genealogy::Wills->new();

# Returns an array of hashrefs
my @smiths = $wills->search(last => 'Smith');	# You must at least define the last name to search for

print $smiths[0]->{'first'}, "\n";

FORMAL SPECIFICATION

[NAME, URL, DIRECTORY]

WillRecord == [
    first: NAME;
    last: NAME;
    url: URL;
    additional_fields: ℙ(NAME × seq CHAR)
]

WillsDatabase == [
    directory: DIRECTORY;
    cache_duration: ℕ;
    logger: LOGGER
]

SearchParams == [
    last: NAME;
    first: NAME;
    optional_params: ℙ(NAME × seq CHAR)
]

│ last ≠ ∅  -- last name cannot be empty
│ |last| > 0  -- last name must have positive length

search: WillsDatabase × SearchParams → ℙ WillRecord

∀ db: WillsDatabase; params: SearchParams •
    params.last ≠ ∅ ⇒
    search(db, params) = {r: WillRecord | r.last = params.last ∧ matches(r, params)}

∀ db: WillsDatabase; params: SearchParams •
    params.last = ∅ ⇒
    search(db, params) = ∅

AUTHOR

Nigel Horne, <njh at nigelhorne.com>

BUGS

SEE ALSO

The Kent Wills Transcript, https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mrawson/genealogy/wills.html

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc Genealogy::Wills

You can also look for information at:

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2023-2025 Nigel Horne.

This program is released under the following licence: GPL2