I’ve just installed Gramps 5.1.3 on Kubuntu.
It took me a few false starts to get my family tree (transferring from some paper trees) up and running.
I have a question because I don’t want to be in a situation in a few months time when I realise I’ve made a serious compilation error.
I’ve looked at the various videos and the Help manual and just want to confirm my approach is ok.
I start from the current generation intending to go backwards in time. I create two new people in People. I then go to Families and create a marriage for them by importing their details. Here I add new children with their birth and death details and import from People the person I have already entered from the generation below when I created that marriage.
I then go back to People to start the next generation going backwards.
Where I have a marriage in siblings that I’m not going to investigate further I again use Families to create a marriage (using the sibling in People) and add a new partner here plus any children.
Does this sound ok (hope I’ve explained this correctly) or am I missing something that may cause issues for me later on?
I think Gramps is an incredible program and I’m glad I persevered with it.
That will work and you can edit later if you’ve missed anything.
But the workflow could be simplified a bit. Adding People, then creating a Family and inserting those People into it is a slower workflow than doing it all in the Relationships view.
When you add Parents or a Spouse to a Person, then a Family is created with the Active person already attached. Then just use the plus ("+") icon (or the Share or Drag’n’drop and existing person) to the appropriate spot in the new Family.
Another option is to use the Data Entry Gramplet to speed up data entry. It is nice because you can use 1 Person as a template to add their siblings from the same source.
Say that you are working from a Family Bible… You’ve already created 1 sibling manually. You’ve already created the parents, the birthplace, the town they moved to later & lived the rest of their lives, the bible as a source. So all you have to do for the next 3 siblings in the Data Entry Gramplet is: copy the Active Person data, choose how they are related, and change any DIFFERING information before adding them.
You tend to work around the same Place & Sources in a session entering data for a branch of a family. It is much easier to copy a Place (or repeated text or Citation) to the Clipboard then drag’n’drop. That saves endlessly searching for the same place over & over with the Select Object list dialog.
Thank you for this expansive reply. At least I know I’m on the right track. I don’t mind being slow as my tree won’t be that extensive (I have a one name study for that!).
I will look at Relationship thanks to see if this is easier for me.
One thing that does irritate me slightly is that once you go back to parish records you are using exclusive events baptisms and burials as opposed to births and deaths. Is there a way of temporarily limiting event entries from the drop down list so that births and deaths no longer show up?
Many thanks
You could probably customize the Data Entry Gramplet source code to be 2 other Events. But that’s a lot of coding.
Personally, if I had a long list of specialized entries like that, I’d export 1 sample person to CSV and work on the list in a spreadsheet. Then import the spreadsheet. It’d be worth the time learning to do that process.
But I’ve not worked such a list. (Also Serge recently added other separator options, like the tab & vertical bar “|”, to the CSV parser. That makes dealing with text list imports where some fields have commas SO MUCH easier. Thanks @SNoiraud !)
Perhaps somebody else can run us through that method? It mostly involves finding the right labels for column headers. And how to add the Citation. (Although I suppose that you could use the Attach Source tool addon in a secondary process. )
I use the Relationships view for almost all of my entries. Based upon the active person, you can add their Parents, and Spouses and their Children all from within this view. The only views I will switch to to add new records will be Sources and Places. Other than these, I find I can do almost everything without leaving Relationships.
