Hi all. I’ve been working the past few years to index the available civil records (B/M/D) for one of my ancestral Italian towns. I’m at the point now (having done about 30 years of records from 1809-1840) where I also want to use that information to start a one place study, adding families and connections in Gramps (5.1.5, Win 10) and then exporting a GEDCOM to share and/or publish online in WikiTree. I have all the indexed data in a Google sheet (about 16,000 records so far), enough with each record to create basic profiles for every person.
I’ve figured out how to manipulate the data in my Google sheets to import the people and create the relationships and events into Gramps through CSV. The rough part is the sources/citations. I’m only using one source (Comune of Modugno Civil Acts). Gramps creates citations from the import for each event, but they are just dummy placeholders. There’s no way that I can see to import the full citation info (year, record type, act number, url to page). Instead I need to go into one of the dummy citations and add all that info, then merge the citations with other citations that were created for the various events related to the family record. It gets quite tedious since just the first year of births (less than 300 records) resulted in about 550 citations (about 300 births and about 250 estimated birth years for parents) that now have to be edited and merged to whittle down to the 291 actual citations for the year.
Is there an easier way I wonder? Or maybe Gramps isn’t the tool for this job?
You’ll want to importing the citations concurrently to the import of Birth/Marriage/Death Events under each Person.
I am assuming that you are connecting the Birth/Death Events to People and Marriage Events to Families during the import. Not stitching them together manually. Likewise, that you are adding People to Families during import.
The process of having a Citation reference created during import is very similar.
Looking at the wiki, the CSV Import and Export webpage does not give an example of a Citation header. For items that are not explicitly listed in those webpages, you can always create an example. In a dummy Tree of Gramps, create a linked record manually (or filter to a representative record in the Example.gramps tree) and export the view(s) to CSV.
A good alternative is to manually create a Sample family in a fresh blank Tree. Then export that to CSV as your reference.
Add a family with parents & a child, with sourced Events for all. Add samples all Event types that you intend to import… making certain to add a Marriage event that is under the Family, not redundantly attached under each spouse. Include a hierarchical Place with GPS coordinates and citations to at least 2 different sources. (I recommend using the Place Cleanup add-on Gramplet to create the best quality Place hierarchy example. It takes some configuring to access the GeoNames webservice. But it is worth the effort.) Then export the entire 3-person Tree to CSV.
Another format is displayed in those options when it has been installed via the Gramps Plugin Manager and then Gramps is restarted.
Because there are no interface options, there is no wiki page for it. And it isn’t in the wiki’s Add-on List either.
If you cannot find it, Matt’s webpage lets you search the Gramps addons for importers/exporters. The JSON add-on IS listed there. (But you’d have to install an external download manually.)
software to transform a formatted CSV file into a Gedcom file