Any way to manually mark people living or dead?

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1

Gramps AIO64-6.0.1–1 on Windows 10.

I know this is a somewhat unorthodox ask, but I’m looking for a way to disable the “Probably Alive” calculations, or at least be able to manually mark whether or not people are living or dead. While I do want to be clear I also use Gramps for its intended function, being a real-life genealogy hobbyist has gotten me into doing fictional genealogy and creating family trees for writing and worldbuilding purposes.

Gramps has been great for that, but the main sticking point has been the Probably Alive feature. Since dates don’t exactly match the real world calendar, it’s just been automatically marking everybody as dead. I’ve been getting around it by using the tags as a way to manually mark people as deceased where needed, but the automatic death markings being permanently there is getting annoying and I was hoping there was any way at all to just disable or override the automatic death markings from the Probably Alive feature. I haven’t really been able to find a concrete answer anywhere, probably because this isn’t remotely the intended use of Gramps, but if anyone has any ideas, I’d really appreciate it.

2

In Preferences on the Limits tab, the setting for the probably alive has a default setting of 110. You can up that to 140 years. If you need a higher number I can find you the line in the code to alter.

3

I’m aware of that setting; the problem is the individuals on my fictional family trees either have birth or death dates that the program cannot parse, or no birth or death dates at all, so that workaround unfortunately doesn’t work for me.

4

Can you raise a feature request to be able to disable the “Probably Alive” option globally or maybe individually or even turn the “Probably Alive” option into a plugin that can be disabled via the plugin manager?

Please provide a small example gramps family tree that shows the existing issue.

5

You can add a ‘dead’ event without date and place for those people, where you don’t have any information, but just know that they are dead.

6

Yes, but unfortunately this doesn’t prevent everyone without a Death event from still being marked dead by the Probably Alive function. So everyone still has the Deceased markers on their records, Death event or no.

7

I can definitely do that, I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a known way to do this or plugin that I missed somewhere before I put that in.

Not sure if you meant provide an example tree here or provide an example tree in the request, but it looks like my account is too new to upload files at the moment anyways. I can upload one to Google Drive or something if anyone needs though.

8

Have you used the Tools → Family Tree Processing → Calculated Estimated Dates… addon tool? (Make a backup first!)

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9

Here’s a wild idea… create a new calendar model. Gramps defines the Hebrew, Islamic, Swedish and other calendars in gramps\gen\lib\gcalendar.py.

It would talk a someone smarter in coding than me. Just throwing the idea into the discussion.

Being probably alive in 140 “Middle Earth” years might be reasonale.

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10

oooh. I completely skipped the part where this is a “World Building with character list” usage

That adds the possibility that there might be different races with different maximum lifespans.

11

I’ve been thinking exactly that. It wouldn’t fix the issue for family trees where I’m not using dates at all but would be a huge gamechanger for the others, and I’d love to be able to actually make use of Gramps’ date functions. I’m starting to dig around now to see if anyone else has figured out something like this, but if not I honestly might look at trying to do it myself.

Yeah, unfortunately that’s been the biggest roadblock and why stuff like the Calculate Estimated Dates addon isn’t really a solution in my specific scenario :frowning: