Introduction and first question (import from Genbox) as a Gramps newbie!

[Jaymchen]

Hello everyone!

My name is Claudia, and I have been researching my family history since 1980, with varying intensity and longer breaks in between.

Back then, no one could have imagined that there would one day be an Internet where you could find so much data about your ancestors. It used to be done via postal mail: writing a letter to a parish or an archive, listing all known ancestors with their details, and then checking the mailbox every day to see if a reply had arrived.

Around the mid-2000s, I began transferring my data from paper family trees and index cards into a program, choosing Genbox because it offered so many appealing features. Unfortunately, it has not been updated for a long time and sometimes crashes, so since yesterday I have been working with Gramps.

Unfortunately (perhaps because I tinkered too much with Genbox’s internals back then, using personal flags, personal identifiers, etc.), Genbox now fails to generate a GEDCOM file that I could import into Gramps.

I took a look at the CSV format I exported earlier. I’m not really an expert, but I had to realize that the GEDCOM tags seem completely messed up—at least they are jumbled, missing, or enclosed with @ symbols. After importing into Gramps, only question marks and strange special characters appear. The media (photos) are there, but no names, no dates, no places, nothing else. A catastrophe!!
All that work…

Over the years, I have accumulated records for more than 1,100 people, which I will probably now have to re-enter manually.
Well, perhaps there is still a solution for this, but before I start, I wanted to familiarize myself with Gramps. I started with location management and am already hitting some limits…

How do you handle this?
For example, the state of Hesse via GET GOV (GOV ID adm_369060):

The Gramps ID is simply overwritten. Wouldn’t this cause problems later on (e.g., during a future GEDCOM export)?

In addition to “Hesse,” there are also Hesse-Homburg, Hesse-Marburg, and Hesse-Nassau, sometimes with completely different state borders and, of course, different historical time periods.

Do you record these under “alternative names” for “Hesse” with the respective time periods?

However, the aforementioned historical Hesse variants each have different GOV IDs, so I have to import them individually… Can I merge them afterward, or will that cause issues?

I am still experimenting…

Thanks for any tips and happy researching,

Claudia aka Jaymchen

GRAMPS AIO64-6.0.8–1
Python: 3.14.4
sqlite: 3.53.0
orjson: 3.11.8
LANG: de_DE.UTF-8
Operating System: Windows 10

[emyoulation]

Welcome

There is another thread about GenBox. But it discusses data transfer via GEDCOM. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be an option for your situation… where you’ve tinkered with Genbox’s internals.

Given that the GEDCOM export fails, are there other options? Is there a format that GenBox uses for ‘backup’ files? As a single-use task, maybe an AI can convert that data to Gramps XML?

[emyoulation]

Another possibility is adapting a fork of the Gramps GEDCOM importer to recognize the mangled GEDCOM. (That assume that it is a consistent mangling… not total gibberish.)

[csam]

@Jaymchen

After importing into Gramps, only question marks and strange special characters appear.

Gramps expects data files to be UTF-8 encoded. Could it be that your CSV file is in another character set?
If that’s the case you must first ‘translate’ the CSV file to UTF-8

[Jaymchen]

Thanks!
I’m replying in German, as my English is suboptimal for such topics ;-, and Chrome offers excellent translation features…

I manually created the Genbox backups. As far as I know, backup files are not created automatically; they must be triggered manually as compressed backups. Since I haven’t lost any data in Genbox, creating a backup wouldn’t have preserved the errors that have now become obvious, would it?

I should try the one-time conversion to XML via AI—it’s worth a shot…
Perhaps another approach would be:

1. to view the gedcom file using Notepad++, or
2. to convert it to CSV and try to salvage something in Excel…
   No idea… It’s not pretty, is it?

[Woody]

Hi Claudia,

Gramps isn’t as bad as it looks.

At first, I thought I’d never understand the program. Now, I don’t want to let it go.

I’ve already written something about the places here.

Import GOV data, organize places in Gramps & historical affiliations**

GetGov If you use GetGOV, it will download the place hierarchy. It will store Its place record ID in the Gramps’ ID field. As you download more records, records with the same GetGOV id will be automatically merged. I started using GetGOV for my German places but no longer use it. It was just too much. All I want is the populated place and the big picture enclosed by hierarchy. I do not want all the administrative offices throughout time.

Could you post the top part of the GEDCOM file here?

Open the file with an editor and copy the beginning into the message.

[GaryGriffin]

My suggestion when using GOV is to use the finest-grain locations to get all of the history of the location. For instance, if you want Hesse and Hesse-Homburg, you might want to load HOMURGJO40HF gov-id. It will populate all of the data for the view (which includes Hesse).

@Jaymchen

The Gramps ID is simply overwritten. Wouldn’t this cause problems later on (e.g., during a future GEDCOM export)?

If you use GOV, then the Gramps ID for the location is the gov-id. If you rename the Gramps ID, then you will keep the data and structure, but GOV will no longer know you loaded these locations and if you request again, they will be repeated. As long as you do not rename the Gramps ID for those places, GOV will know you already have them and will not reload them.

For instance, if you load Homburg HOMURGJO40HF it loads:

and then later load Marburg object_1144802 , the duplicates will not be re-loaded

With a graph of

and the combined structure will be in Gramps.

[Jaymchen]

Thanks to everyone.

I managed to fix my gedcom file using Notepad++ and AI, so that all 1,103 people and so on are now in Gramps…
I’m so happy!!!
Anyone who has done genealogical research for a long time knows how much time is embedded in their data. That easily adds up to several months! But it is also an indescribably exciting “hobby.”

Now I’ll take care of the imported places, which was already suboptimal under Genbox…
I just need to get a bit more comfortable with it, but I’m already starting to get a feel for how Gramps works…
Genbox wasn’t intuitive to grasp either; it just takes a little practice.

Gramps is a fantastic program, by the way. Thanks to the developers, it’s truly amazing!

[emyoulation]

You should probably install the Multimerge family of (free) addon Gramplets from the Isotammi group.

The will help you consolidate duplicate Places. (GEDCOM usually creates endless duplicate Places.)

[Davesellers]

I also tried get GOV and didn’t like it. I use FamiySearch Places data. It copies into gramps easily. I’m in full control of it too so nothing extra is added that I don’t want.

If your gedcom has been imported, you likely only need to use the gramps tools to clean it up a bit.

[hartenthaler]

What is the reason why you don’t like GOV? GOV gives you information about places, their hierarchy in administration (state and church), from a farm or a church up to a country. GOV has a focus on Central Europe in the timeframe from 1800 until today, but it is open to other regions and centuries. You are free to add missing or correct existing data in GOV. I like and use GOV for all of my places.

[Davesellers]

Too complicated for my old brain. Not in English so I have to set the browser to translate. I tried the plug-in and it downloaded something not in English and added many items I did not want. I admit maybe I don’t know how to use it.

If I use FS Places, I can copy the whole string from the record I’m working on and it will give me the match or some other close matches, one click to open the record and I can then copy/paste the lat/log and info text into gramps. I just have to select Enclosed by and maybe some dates if the location specifics changed over time.