I installed Gramps just a few months ago for a very small project, but it appears that once you get going in genealogy, it is hard to stop. Thank you for Gramps–I find it robust and intuitive. The only issue I hit so far is that I had to figure out how to map the MARRIAGE field from my mother-in-law’s Family Tree Maker database to Gramps’s native marriage field. But, that turned out to be easy enough.
I used Python to create a spreadsheet that shows all birth, death, and marriage events on each day of the year. I use this to send out family “on this day” texts, which has been super fun.
Wonderful program. I just used the Donation link to help support development efforts. Thank you!
I’m curious about your spreadsheet approach? What does it offer that you have not found in Gramps? (I can think of a few options right off the bat. But I don’t send family texts so your real-world use might suggest other possibilities.)
The On This Day quick report is a bit of an “Easter Egg”. It can be seen by its name in the interface in an unexpected spot. And its documentation is well-hidden in the wiki.
This quick report is invoked by double-clicking a day in the built-in Calendar gramplet with show a list of Events that occurred that day and month. Or right-click on an Event in an Event view to choose it from the “Quick View” contextual submenu.
I appreciate the questions about exporting to a spreadsheet instead of using native functionality. Part of it is that for unknown reasons I get inconsistent results inside of Gramps with the two methods I’ve tried inside the program. For instance, my spreadsheet shows that today, July 26, three things happened:
Birth of GL in 1916
Death of AO in 1959
Birth of SM in 2004
When I use the calendar report, for some reason Gramps only outputs the more recent two events to the calendar. The better way to do it is the Events pane since it will always be up to date. However, if I type in “07-26” into the date filter on the Events pane, only the birth of SM in 2004 shows up. I don’t know why. If I type “1916” into that filter, the birth of GL shows up just fine (although, so do lots of random events that don’t appear to have anything to do with 1916).
When I look at the birth dates of both GL and SM, I can’t detect any formatting differences that would lead to inconsistent results:
1916-07-26
2004-07-26
UPDATE: After typing all that, emyoulation’s most recent posting popped up. I didn’t know anything about add-ons or gramplets, but I added the This Day in Family History add-on and it seems to work perfectly, listing all three events that also show up in the spreadsheet. That’s excellent.
The only thing the add-on doesn’t get me that the spreadsheet does is a peek at tomorrow’s events, which isn’t that big a deal. I should really figure out why filtering in the Events pane doesn’t work as expected.
Another update: Took me a minute to figure out how to display the Calender gramplet on the dashboard, but now that it is showing, that’s a great way to look ahead if I want to see what happened on this day tomorrow. Thank you, emyoulation!
Didn’t notice that one event was a death. Dave is right about that being the difference. But this is likely to bite you in the future.
One of the things that is easy to miss are the “Roles” for events. That is because Gramps has sufficient context to “guess” the role when creating a new event for a Person (Primary role) or Family (Family role). So you probably don’t even notice that the Role does anything.
However, when you Share or drag’n’drop an existing event, the context becomes fuzzy. So Gramps sets the shared role to an Unknown role.
An Unknown role is always wrong (or more accurately, incomplete). (The FilterRules (pack 1) includes addon custom filter rule to search for roles in Persons or Families. The the Validate the Data addon identifies many types of data-entry problems.)
Please double-check the top Reference information section’s General tab for the role. Verify the Role is Primary for a Person events or Family for a Family event. Family role means that both partners (but none of the Children) simultaneously hold an equally Primary role in that event.
The Calendar report is showing one death and one birth on this day, so it can’t be the “Include death dates” checkbox causing the missing birth on the calendar. (This is just for completeness–now that I’m aware of the This Day in Family History functionality, I don’t need the calendar.)
To emyoulation’s suggestion, I surveyed a sample of events, including events related to the people not showing up when I filter the Events pane on “07-26” and it appears that everyone in my database shows up as the Primary role in their birth or death and Family role for marriages. Which I believe is what it should be.
I will note that when I filter on “07-26” in the Events pane, Gramps turns it red, so it knows that it is an incomplete or malformed date, which could be messing with the filtering. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised events are missing when I filter that way, but instead I should be surprised that any events show up at all.
However, the excellent news is that the This Day in Family History plug-in + the Calendar gramplet work perfectly for my use case–I’m grateful from this conversation to know they exist!
Could you export (and share via Private Messaging) the person (GL) with the Birth that does not appear in the reports?
The quickest way to create a Person custom filter is with the Clipboard.
Copy that person to the clipboard. Then select them on the Clipboard and use the right-click context menu to “Create a filter from the person selected…” and save it as Clipboard GL. Then use that filter to export that person.
Make sure you choose 2 export options:
Reference Filter: “Do not include records not linked to a selected person”
Use Compression : Deselect
Note that export options are persistent and there is no ‘reset to default’. So don’t accidentally make your future “backups” with a filter to that single person.
You can use any text editor to inspect the (uncompressed) file. So you can anonymize the Names and ensure that you will not be sharing private info.
The PM shortcut is to click on the Avatar for the person you want to PM in the thread. This addresses the PM, adds the forum subject as a default message name, and cites part of the forum message.
The long way around is to click your own avatar (in the upper right) and select the envelope (twice) to open the Private Messaging interface. That way requires finding the screen name, composing a title.
For anyone following along… the importing the exported gl.gramps single-person seems to have healed the file. That birth shows up where it did not before.
So we’re trying a backup and restore to a new tree.
And also making a backup of the SQLite folder before using the Check and Repair Database tool.
A related question: Does anyone know how to refresh the This Day in Family History addon? It seems the only way I can get it to update to today if I leave Gramps running overnight is to shut Gramps down and launch it again.
According to the code, editing a person or family will trigger an update. The only other event that will refresh the data is a change in the Home Person so you can switch the Home Person and then back again.
