I do not currently have GRAMPS but am looking to switch to GRAMPS after a possible Linux computer purchase in the very near future.
I currently use different genealogy software on Windows 7. In this software, I can click on an individual, myself for example, and have all my direct ancestors’ names display in the color I choose. I use one for my father’s line and one for my mother’s line. I have many other family lines in my database, all color coded, which helps me immensely with scrolling through the lines. It also helps me see where other lines intersect with mine.
Does GRAMPS have the ability to do this? I wasn’t able to locate anything in the available online documentation. My database has 30K people from close to 20 families (my parents, various in-laws, a few friends who turned out to be distant cousins). Because of the number of people, the ability to color code is important to me.
Also, does GRAMPS handle dates before 100 AD? Because of a few family lines linked to royal blood lines in Europe, I have dates prior to 100 AD, back to 40 BC.
Thanks for any guidance. I hope I can switch to GRAMPS!
Not so far. Checked the feature request and in twenty years no one has asked for this feature so you are welcome to raise a feature request for it on the bug tracker.
Possibly somebody else will have to say if this is possible?
Information about supported dates for Gramps in the user manual see Editing dates
FYI “GRAMPS” is just plain old “Gramps” to everybody around here stopped using the upper case version about 10 years ago!
You can… but it is not so automated. You would have to tag each line. But you could cycle through the lines with filters to apply the tags.
The original proposal shows how users could leverage the Tags feature to apply different color Tags to your various lines. That was implemented back in 2011 with Gramps 3.3
The mockup has a no longer used “zebra striping” or “color banding.” for the tables. But the coloring of the text is accurate.
Gramps works off of the Active Person in most views and there are gramplets that will immediately show the ancestors and another the descendants. These gramplets can be dragged off of the view to free float and when closed automatically return to the view.
Yes, you can use tags to color code which branch of the tree a relative is on. But in my case, the color coding would be useless. My maternal grandparents were 7th cousins. A relative on my father’s sister married someone from my mother’s branch.
As far as dates are concerned, using the Date Editor you can enter dates that do not conform to the Gregorian calendar, and you can enter in any year (I have never done a BCE year) you want.
It does not cost you anything, except a little time, to try Gramps out. Newbies to Gramps often complain of a steep learning curve. Often this is because we do not spoon feed you with ‘this is way to do things’. But there is an active community here to assist you.
Dates that import as “text” because the they uses “BC” instead of “BCE” can be revised en masse to the “before common era” notation via a script in the SuperTool addon.
They can also be revalidated by sending them back through the date parser including lines from the following script:
