Best Way to Enter a Lineage

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(Gramps v4.5.1.6, Windows 11 x64)

I’m very new to Gramps and I’m trying to figure out if it will serve my needs. I have quite a large lineage I’d like to enter into it, and it consists of multiple families which are sometimes connected and sometimes not. But there are also lineages, such as teacher/student or ordination of priests/monks from one to the next. It’s that last lineage part I’m having trouble with. I tried entering them in as Associations and it seems work as far as storing the data, but I’d like to be able to generate a report or chart of the lineages, like seeing a tree of teacher to student all the way down the line, and I can’t see a way to do that. Am I going about this the wrong way or am I missing something? I’m open to any suggestions!

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Have you tried looking at the Deep Connections Addon Gramplet?

It looks for the connection between the Active Person and the Home Person. In the following example, I’ve marked a series of 4 William Bouchers as a series of Godfather Associations to the next.

So William was the Godfather of William C.; who was the Godfather of William Donel; who was the Godfather of the Home Person, William J.
image

And if I run Sync Association addon tool to create the reciprocal Associations (Godchild to …) then I can look from the opposite side of the chain of associations. I set William as the Home Person instead of William J.; then select William J. as the Active Person:
image

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I did try that, and that works for seeing the associations on the sidebar. But I want to make them show up on reports, like family trees.

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Think of Gramps as a collection of tools to link people together.

Gramps is designed to handle families that have parents and often children and these people can be members as parents and children of multiple families.

Taking the Teacher / Student dynamic, I can envisage using a Gramps “Family” to bring these people together.

Think of the “Family” as a Class, Enter the “Teacher” as one of the parents. The Class event is the academic year with the school as the Place. Use the event Description to specify a Class description. The Children are the students. Teachers can have many different Class/Families. Student can be a member multiple Classes.

Not knowing your actual needs, you use the structural tools that Gramps gives you model the relationships between the people in your database.

One of the things to remember, the drop-down list of options for types of Families, Events, etc is not limited to the provided lists. You can type in custom entries.

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What I’m trying to do is research the history of a martial arts lineage, which included a lot of family relationships as well as teacher-student relationships which may be within the family or not. In addition to being able to generate reports and family trees based on family relationships, I’d like to also be able to do the same for the teacher-student relationships. Both at once would be nice, too.

Are Events necessary for doing something like this? Because these aren’t teacher-student in the sense of taking a specific class, but more like a lifelong disciple situation.

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I would have made a place for the Dojo (can be multiple) in a place hierarchy,
then add the Teacher/Master as a person (then you can also do this Master’s family lineage if you want to)
then add as many Class Events (events can be as long as you need) to that Teacher as Shared Events, you will then be able to add a custom role for the person, add attributes and notes that a specific for that person etc.

Then do the same for any students that participated in those classes with custom roles and any attributes you like, e.g., Grades etc.
Usually a student would evolve, also in martial arts and move up to new “classes” as they get better/older.

You can add shared events to both family members and non-family members.

If you can’t find a report that have the features you need, you can try a feature request.

An alternative for your type of research is to use an advanced timeline software like Aeon Timeline 3 (not free or open source, not Linux), but it has limited reports… you can visualize what you need in it though.

Another alternative is to use Obsidian and build up your research in notes for places, teachers, students, families and members, events, sources etc., adding wikilinks with descriptions etc. in each of the notes as you like, in free form or structured text forms, then use some of the many add-ons for generating timelines, lineages for dojos/teachers/students etc.

You will have a network graph for all the links and tags so you at any time you can see the relations, and you can filter what you like, add some colors to the nodes (notes) in the graph based on your notes YAML etc. etc.

I use this approach for all my research on the Norwegian Mercantile Fleet, where I have links from ships to journeys to sailors and owners and passengers, as well as having links from journeys to ports, and all is linked to a huge number of sources via citations.
In addition, I can add images to the different notes.

There is a longform addon that can be used if you like to make longer articles or books that holds a selection of your notes, there is map addons, timeline addons etc. etc.

just some tips for how you can solve your research.

EDIT:
I should add that you of course can add all your markdown Notes to your Gramps objects as media files.

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