I think this is not the first time this question has been asked, because pets are often part of the family.
No, you don’t marry pets and don’t get children with pets.
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Some people use gramps to make horses, cats or dogs genealogy.
The problem is how to mix people and pets.
Its true, but sometimes pets are an important part of a person’s life. Sorry to hear that(
Чт, 13 марта 2025 г. в 20:11, csam via The Gramps Project (Discourse Forum & Mailing List) <notifications@gramps.discoursemail.com>:
An off the wall thought…
Include an event in the family edit. Custom type: Pet, add the appropriate date information and use the Description field for its name. Maybe an Attribute for the Breed and one for Sex. And the event will handle the pet’s pictures.
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I’ve documented my pets this way in Gramps, only caveat is that Gramps calculates ‘Age’ from my marriage date (1st date in the family’s record) to the event date. Any ideas how I can get Gramps to display Age correctly?
One good solution would be to have new genders type like:
0 → female
1 → male
2 → unknown
3 → other
4 → pet
we could use the reports for pets…
We have birth and death for these pets as well as events.
perhaps we need to split pet in categories (cat, dog, horses, exotic pets…)
If I go further, we could have objects like houses, cars… with birth = purchase date and death date = accident date or selling date
This is only one idea
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As I understood from the answers, all that remains is to describe pets and important family facts in the free fields 
Сб, 15 марта 2025 г. в 14:24, Serge Noiraud via The Gramps Project (Discourse Forum & Mailing List) <notifications@gramps.discoursemail.com>:
This is not something I would do myself (I have not considered recording pets) but it is an option…
If you are someone who thinks of pets as “fur babies”, you could add the pet as a Person with a “Species” attribute. Perhaps using a reserved surname “Species:canine”
Then link them through a shared Adoption event between the pet and the Family/Person. Or use an Association.
And instead of a Married state for the Family, it could be a Litter.
(I do not think using Gender is a good option though. Other species, with a few exceptions, are still genetically male or female.)
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You can also relate that “persona”, the pet to any Events with a custom role where the pet was a participant of the event, et can even get its own primary events where its human family was participants.
In theory you could also add it to the family as a child as you say with an adoption type or some special type… problem is that it will be seen as a person in most reports and in exports…
But as we earlier have talked about Artifacts and “vessels”, maybe a third “type” in that hierarchy could be pets, it would work if we could add events to those entities…
Only thing needed in addition for an entity like that was some way to calculate birth and death with Event types… but that would be a good feature for ships and other vessels to, to be able to calculate the full life length of a ships that was created in 1906 and torpedoed in 1943 as an example…
If you want a really simple workaround in an external software…
Use Obsidian and Markdown…
Create a folder hierarchy in a root folder where you make a sub-folder for each type of object/subject you have, e.g.
Genealogy (root folder)
- Person/People
-
- Johnsson Bart
- Pets and livestock
-
- Mattie the cat
-
- Crazy Dog-las the dog
- Places
- Sources
etc., etc.
Create a markdown file with a YAML header for each object and link different notes together with wiki-links
In Obsidian you can create templates for different types of notes.
You can even show multiple notes in one main note if you want to.
An quick example for a note for a pet could be:
(YAML start “- - -” )
type: pet
breed: ghostdog from backyard
name: Dog-las
born: 1756
dead: still going strong 2025
number of killed postmen: 3407
last owner: [[me|Bart Johnsson]]
(YAML end “- - -”)Dog-las (b. 1756)
The story about when this creature come to be your backyard chief of command [[some links]], [[and even more links]]
I do this for a lot of different “things” in my research and then add these notes as media files in Gramps under what Gramps object that it belong…
When you create structured data in the markdown notes, it will be relatively easy to create a python script that can transcode those to a Gramps XML if Gramps should get support for this later…
There are so many plugins in Obsidian, so you can create timelines, reports familytrees etc. just by some simple keywords etc.
You can, if you want to, use Zotero and Tropy and for Zotero use it dynamically for adding sources/citations, and with Tropy, you can export a csv or a json-ld file and use the data with your markdown vault in different ways.
This is just a short mockup as a tip for an alternative workflow while you wait… that actually work surprisingly well…
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