One thing I do sometimes at our family reunions is to do a presentation (I’m a retired college professor, so just try to stop me). I usually pick an interesting part of our family history (like two brothers that married two sisters) and weave a tale showing pictures of ports, ships, paths, locations, and the people. I usually use something like Google Slides to present it.
But I’ve been thinking about a way to do it from on top of Gramps. After all, Gramps already has all that information: events, places, dates, and media. But often times, I don’t do justice to the story as just a note.
Well, I’ve been building a new version of Gramps, called Gramps Connect, that run on your desktop, or on a host. It uses HTML for the graphics. My goals for the Story project:
- Build an easy way to do a presentation
- Make it easy to edit
- Beautiful to display
- Save it in Gramps (as a formatted note)
- Make the maps interactive, to really explore an area live during a showing
- Share it with my collaborators, and allow them to edit it as well
So, this will be a part of the next Gramps Connect release (coming soon). Here is a video showing me looking for a person (“Baron von Gramps”), selecting them, and clicking “Add a story”:
[Images courtesy of the Gramps Web Demo project of European Royalty]
The “Add a story” collects all of the events of a person, and automatically creates a representation of the story. The story is shown immediately, but can them be edited and has a preview:
Each slide can have a reference to a place, media, and text. The idea is to be able to connect people, places, and dates with images into a coherent and engaging story, and save it as part of Gramps itself.
Slide from the above movie:
I really love to create software that can allow the user to be creative, and this scratched a particular itch of mine. Do you have ideas to make it better? I would love to hear them 
