Associating people for events?

gramps 5.1.5-1
windows 10 x64
Lang: nl-be

On a person you can make associations.

Now when there is a marriage, I add an event “marriage”.
There i cannot add an association. I can add an attribute to the event with the property “witness”.

Now if Peter and Julia getting married. Now I have to add the association of the witnesses to Peter And to Julia (because the event itself doesn’t seem to let me link/associate a Person).

What am I doing wrong or how to you associate persons to both (Peter and Julia) in case of a wedding or another event (e.g. godfather/godmother in case of baptism)

(additional question: I use the report: relations (dutch: ‘Verwantschappengrafiek’) to show my entire tree. How can these assocations also be made visible?)

There is a “How do I…” category wiki article on “Add a Witness”.

Event roles and Association roles are two explicit ways of creating relationships in Gramps. (The Family container is another. It has Implicit roles connecting spouses to each other and their offspring. Another explicit but often overlooked method is the Internal link feature in Notes.)

Sharing Julia & Peter’s marriage Event (which is a ‘Family’ role in their Family container) to be an Event with a ‘Witness’ role for ‘John’ is the best approach. It ties a lot more dimensions and proof into how Julia & Peter relate to John than using Associations.

Each of the Associations is unidirectional (not bidirection nor omnidirectional) and fairly one dimensional. Although it allows a little breadth with the ability to add sources & notes, it only specifies that Person1 has a relationship to Person2. There isn’t a relationship in the other direction. (“Sheldon” might have a ‘fanboy’ Association role with “Albert Einstein” but Einstein has no reciprocal relationship to Sheldon.)

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If you mean the Relationship Graph, I don’t think it can show Associations. (In fact, I don’t know of any graphical reports showing Associations, or the names of people having other roles in a person’s Events, though I could simply be unaware of them.)

You could export your data and use some graphing software (for example, the software called yEd can read a GEDCOM file) but you would need to do a bit of work there to get something other than a normal tree.

Thanks, i’ve indeed found now that you can share events and add different roles (for the godfather/godmother/witness/etc…).

When I now share events and add event roles instead of associations, which one is better?

Now the only thing left is trying to print out a graph with everything (all people, all relations, …)

Sharing through Events is significantly more visible than by Association. And it connects ALL the participants to both the Event and the other participants.

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Don’t do that. As your tree grows, you’ll see that arrows in the graphs tend to cross, making difficult to follow a path when the angle is small and there are several lines near the crossing point.

It is better to draw several partial graphs with a specific emphasis: ancestors of a person, descendants (though this one is denser with higher risk of confusion), … A good general-purpose synthesis is the NarrativeWeb HTML collection of pages you can access in a web browser (requires though some skills to set up the site but can be used directly from the generated files). All links are clickable to navigate across the tree.

@pgerlier well “the problem” is that I’m now almost only being able to distinguish family members in the written documents based on the witnesses, godparents, etc… There are several people within the same year(s) with the same name and I can only link them based on the related family branches (parents in law, etc…).

It would be much much easier if I could have some document next to me not only showing the direct relations (parent/child/…) but also the event rols (godfather, godmother, witness, …)

Do you try the Deep Connections Graph addon from Isotammi project ?

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