While doing a periodic look for new search engine indexing of Gramps mentions, something interesting popped up.
In mid January 2024, there was a posting to the r/Genealogy sub-reddit asking for recommendations: “genealogy software for a native american tribe”. (The user simultaneously cross-posted to r/Ancestry subreddit. Ten months later, that posting is still awaiting moderator approval.)
A response suggested Gramps then further suggested adding a Cherokee calendar and holidays customization. The other suggestion was a new tool called Memory Keeper, an Indigenous Nations customization based on TiddlyWiki.
It looks like they opted for Gramps … since there are now pages on CherokeeRegistry.com that say how to use it and PDF forms for tribal citizenship applications.
- Free genealogy forms and software – Cherokee Registry
- How to enroll in a Cherokee Tribe – Cherokee Registry
Those PDF form archives are all of the “print and fill out manually” variant, not fillable Forms. So the manual work is doubled. The applicant hand-writes and then the Cherokee Registry staff have to hand transcribe.
Being selected by a heritage society is beneficial to the Gramps community. The Finnish Genealogical Society exposed a lot of opportunities for improvement.
But one thing that is common to all heritage societies is that they have forms to fill out for membership. If Gramps could push data to PDF forms and suck data back into a Tree, then Gramps becomes an obvious choice for simplifying the membership application process. (I am hoping that the @RenTheRoot forms project will eventually intersect with a PDF fill-able forms input/output feature.) Python has libraries for interacting with fill-able PDF forms.