I just needed to export sample data for a DNA related issue. Since DNA data tends to involve living persons, it made sense to export a limited skeleton of my tree with mostly redacted data.
Sufficiently redacting the skeletal tree was a very involved process.
Steps
Create the skeleton tree
Export the Home Person (myself), the cousins with the DNA matches in question, a ‘control’ cousin without a match, and the pedigrees linking the cousins through common ancestors to the Home Person.
This was accomplished by using a Custom Filter with the Relationship path between <person> and people matching <filter> rule.
My choice for “matching <filter>” was a based on Tagged persons. I created a Tag and then (laboriously) found each cousin and added Tags. (No drag’n’drop for a tag. And extended selection for the cousins wasn’t viable.)
I later realized it would’ve been easier to use the Clipboard. Copy the cousins and use its context menu to “Create Filter from the person(s) selected…”.
The (colored) Tags still proved a good way to unambiguously flag the Home Person and the target cousins in the People category views. But it would’ve been easier to use the Add/Remove Tag addon tool with the Clipboard-generated Custom Filter. Or to use Filter Gramplet to show the that Custom Filter in the flat list People view, do a select-all and then Edit → Tag → Add tag ‘DNA matches’
A basic skeleton was exported using the “Relationship path” filtered data to a “Gramps XML (family tree)” (not a “Gramps XML Package (family tree and media)” with the Reference Filters “Do not include records not linked to a selected person”
Creating a new, blank Family Tree and importing the exported skeleton didn’t give me what was expected. Instead of exactly matching the Gramps IDs in the 2 trees, the “I%04d” ID Formats Preferences for the Person overrode the “I%08d” leading zeros. (Which is one of the differences between an import-based backup recovery and a true “Restore from backup” recovery.) My system had difference ID Formats preferences than those of my pen-pal. So suddenly, we were not using the same references.
That leading-zero difference complicated eMail discussions using reference Gramps IDs. Worse, it changed tool and rule parameters between us.
Winnowing the skeleton tree data
Next, the distractions and excessive Privacy exposures needed to be cleaned out.
Started with the easy items:
- in Events view, delete all records with event types not related to the issue. Birth & Death give context to the relationships. I have DNA Testing recorded as Medical Information. So deleted everything but Birth, Death and Medical Information Events.
- in Source view, delete all Source not related to the issue.
- Another export cycle removed all the unconnected data
Too much detail in the Events is also an exposure. So used the MultiMerge addon gramplet to collapse the Place hierarchy to State administrative level.
That left the things that had to be done manually.