Running Gramps 5.1.6 on a MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon) with Sonoma 14.2.1.
Back in the misty dawn of time I ran lifelines on a NeXT machine, and still have the database. I had managed to make decent progress at the time, until life and career took over. While the data is stored in GEDCOM format, I’m not sure what the database layout itself is, it looks like a b-tree folder structure, no extension on the files, but a key file at each level of the hierarchy.
Gramps throws it’s hands in the air and has no idea what to do with this. I’ve tried Autodetect, Gedcom, etc. It looks like Gramps wants to see one file or package, while this is simply a folder hierarchy with a bunch of leaves/files. aa, ab, ac, etc.
Does anyone know how I might get my old data imported into Gramps?
lifelines doesn’t seem to run on the Apple Silicon machines, tried that earlier, which is how I discovered Gramps.
Gramps throws it’s hands in the air and has no idea what to do with this.
Does Gramps provide an error message, if so please provide?
Gedcom, etc. It looks like Gramps wants to see one file or package, while this is simply a folder hierarchy with a bunch of leaves/files. aa, ab, ac, etc.
That does not sound like a GEDCOM file, which is only ever a single text file.
Gramps is looking for GEDCOM version 5.0 to 5.5 so you might need to modify the GEDCOM depending on what version it is, you can check by opening the GEDCOM file in a text editor and please copy & paste the first 10 lines here (ps;remove any private info) .
That sounds like the GEDCOM file was segmented with a program like GEDSplit. (For back when slow dialup was a major consideration. Dropped connections on a big files meant you started again from the beginning… and prayed.)
Are all the files of a similar size?
Usually these files were packaged with a small .exe to re-assemble the big GEDCOM file.
Although segmentation was part of GEDCOM spec… but was rarely supported.
That’s how lifelines stored the data in text files with GEDCOM fragments and according to the user manual to save it to a GEDCOM you needed to select “Save the database in a GEDCOM file” which does not seem to be an option for @tll .
I’m not sure if you can manually concatenate the files together and copy over a GEDCOM header to make a working GEDCOM, I suggest looking at the lifelines sourcecode for “Save the database in a GEDCOM file” to get an idea on how the GEDCOM is created? [Edit: Looking at “lifelines-3.0.62\src\gedlib\gedcom.c” the GEDCOM save does more than concatenate the file]
Easiest is if you can setup a VM (virtual machine) with an OS that supports lifelines and then save the file to GEDCOM!
Another possibility depending on how large your family tree was, is to open each of the text files ( or concatenate them all together) and manually copy and paste the result into Gramps, this assumes you are familiar with the GEDCOM syntax?
I just found that I can install lifelines in Linux Mint 21.3, right from the standard software library. And that means that you can probably restore your tree by installing Mint, or another ubuntu/debian based Linux, in a VM, just like our webmaster suggested earlier.
Tom Wetmore (originator of Lifelines) has a new project called DeadEnds, posted to GitHub in Nov 2023. He describes it as a ‘follow-on’ for Lifelines, which featured use of a “B-Tree based database that stores genealogical records in Gedcom format”.
DeadEnds might be able to do something with the B-Tree files.
Error message is: File type “” is unknown to Gramps. Valid types are .
This database is multiple plain text files, each in GEDCOM format, but spread across multiple directories in what appears to be a b-tree structure, or similar.
Based on when this was released and the timestamp of my database, I would suppose that it’s GEDCOM 5.0, possibly 5.1.
Thanks, good idea. I was able to download the free version of VMWare Fusion and installed OpenBSD 14 as a VM. Will see if I can get lifelines running on it.