Those of you who subscribe to HelpMeFind website may want to weigh in on a suggestion I made for enhancing the advanced search feature. See
Link: www.helpmefind.com/gardening/l.php?l=2.850&threadID=49209&qcID=49224&tab=32#p49224
This could be posted to HMF but I thought it might be of more general interest. Not knowing the structure of their database I am only speculating. The programming may be a bit harder than it seems.
Above, Don suggested an enhanced search feature in following pedigrees from the descendants direction. I commented that the synonymy was what really was hard to handle. So below is a proposed solution.
If every rose got a numerical assignment, like my employee number in the state database, it would be immutable. Suppose that numbers below 10,000 were given to all roses introduced prior to 1900. The for each decade of the 20th another 10,000 would be permitted. Thus anything up to 100,000 would be in that century. Larger numbers would be for this century. Perhaps we could reduce this some but I don’t know the time spread of introductions, only that there have been 15-20,000 quoted as having been in commerce at various times, which averages over 1000/decade for many decades. Having a numbering “system” has some advantages over strictly arbitrary numbering.
All synonyms would be alphabetized in the database within the record of this single reference number. Then in a listing of generations of offspring, all synonyms sharing a single number could be placed on a single line of the display, and only the first alphabetic entry need be shown as first name on a line. You might have 3-10 on a line, but probably not more. If the assigned number were displayed, one could see something of the chronology of usage of a rose for each generation of offspring, at least to the nearest decade.
I think that once you’ve reduced it to this form, then displaying the second parent of an offspring ought not to be hard. Or at least the searcher would only have to click on one name per synonym cluster to find out the parent. This might reduce manual search times 2-5 x.