Hello everyone,
I am currently busy making my location data “Gramps-ready”—or rather, GEDCOM-ready:
It’s a massive undertaking, but I am getting to know Gramps very well at this level.
QUESTION:
Under Place → Type, there is an option to create custom types. Since I previously tinkered too much with the “internals” in Genbox—and am now having a real headache with the resulting GEDCOM exports—I want to avoid repeating that mistake.
What exactly are the consequences for future GEDCOM exports (exchanging data with other researchers, uploading to various platforms) if I use this option and create custom types?
Or would I be better off sticking to the default types?
Gramps beta 6.2-1
Translated from German to English using Google Translate.
I cannot tell you the effect custom place types will have in GEDCOM. The last time I used a GEDCOM was when I migrated to Gramps many years ago now.
There are some place Types that do have a particular use in Gramps.
Number and Street are used to determine their order in building a place name.
In the Preferences’ Data tab the default is to use the Automatic Place format with the display set to Full. This creates the display 123, Main Street, Any Town, …. But you can create your own format using the attached editor. One of the formatting options is Street format. None leaves the formatting as is, 123, Main Street. Number Street removes the comma; 123 Main Street. Street Number swaps them and removes the comma; Main Street 123.
Depending on the preponderance of your place records, you can set the correct address display.
The other select list of place types are referred to as Populated Places. City, Town, Village and Hamlet. In the place editor for custom formats you can set levels to display. I find this useful in Graphic views and reports where long place names do not fit.
I have set up a format that only displays City, State using the Levels setting p, -2. This ignores any place record before the Populated place (address, Cemetery, Hospital, etc), skips over the next place record (the county) then adds the State and then nothing else. This works for me in the United States. Depending on a user’s particular place structure another format may be better.
Thank you very much, thank you DaveSch!
It is important to me to know whether using custom types will cause “disadvantages” when exporting to GEDCOM later on. How do others handle this—specifically those focusing their research on Germany?
(I do have ancestors from Poland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden as well.)
Background:
I have already gained valuable insights into my ancestry from the family trees of other researchers and would like to be able to give something back—in GEDCOM format.
I also don’t know how long I will be using Gramps, and—as I mentioned—if I ever switch software, I don’t want to end up with a mess like that again.
I do a lot of gedcom uploads to WikiTree. On that site it just takes the Place and puts it in the Place field. I have not looked in the gedcom file to even see if the Type is there. The only time the Type helps me is if I need to distinguish between places with the same name, like a village and parish. I have added some custom types when the one needed is not included in the list. I don’t think it would matter on the sites I access: Ancestry, Find My Past, WikiTree or Family Search.
Nearly all genealogical programs in Germany are supporting the GEDCOM-L addendum.
That document defines location data records (_LOC), allowing names and types for locations and many more information fields, like references to GOV. That allows you to present location hierarchies in historical and actual versions. But unfortunately Gramps does not support GEDCOM-L.
It does not matter how places are presented in Gramps, for answering your question you have to export your tree to GEDCOM and read and check the GEDCOM using a text editor.
Gramps location management is really good, but you will loose a lot of information by export to GEDCOM. Another Gramps user, Ulrich Demlehner, had the same problem for transferring his data related to farms (Höfeforschung) to the Online-OFB service of CompGen. He finally used the Gramps-XML export converting it externally to GEDCOM-L and imported that into Online-OFB.
See Genealogie und Geografie verknüpft in Ortsfamilienbüchern • Verein für Computergenealogie e.V. (CompGen)
Hi @Jaymchen,
to answer your actual question: Gramps’ current Gedcom 5.5.1 exporter ignores place types. So using custom place types is safe in the sense that it doesn’t cause problems, but it’s lost on export.
I created an importer/exporter for the modern Gedcom 7 format and it does export place types - in that case, place types are just strings, so it doesn’t matter to the importer/exporter whether your place type is custom or built-in, it will just read/write it.
Unfortunately, it’s not available in the current Gramps version as an addon yet, only in Gramps Web, but we’re currently thinking about how to add it.
Best regards,
David