What do you think I should know that I won’t find in the manual and I won’t find in the videos?
I am new to Gramps and new to genealogy. I have just inherited about four generations of photographs and notes on the family. My goal is to create a repository of that information and those images and let one of the younger generation run with it.
I’m currently on a Windows 11 machine but my Lightroom habit may have me migrating to a mac in the next year or two.
Giving these basic parameters, (a fresh install on Windows 11, a possible need to migrate to a Mac, a definite desire to hand over the core of the project to someone else in a few years time, and the need to share on Gramps web) any top tips or non-obvious bits of advice you can give me?
Installation on either Windows or Mac is not a problem. just create on Windows and then when necessary migrate database to Mac
Best advice do not dive straight in. create a dummy or practice tree and ensure you try and understand all the elements you will need to achieve what you want.
Don’t hold your breath whilst waiting a response from the next generation.
phil
In my opinion, the most important surprise is that add-ons are as valuable and often more intuitive as built-in features. Download the (somewhat outdated) Addon Plugins Guide PDF for the official Addons repository. (It is a LOT easier to peruse a PDF than explore a wiki patchwork of docs.)
It sounds like you’re starting from scratch and roughing in the genealogical data entry can be tedious. But you’ll want the people in the photos to be in your Tree first.
So you might want to jumpstart with the living relatives and stitch them into families. Then try out the tools for labeling recent family photos on your phone.
If you have a GEDCOM from another program (or from a relative who does genealogy), you can import that by opening that file from the Windows desktop context menu and choose Gramps as the program with which to open it. That does the non-intuitive bits about creating a blank tree, naming it and loading it before the “Family Trees → Import” menu item will appear.
If you do NOT have a file from somewhere else, you probably have a lot of your living relatives in your phone contact list. You can export that as a vCard archive. Then import that archive into Gramps.
This will add a bunch of unconnected contacts in as individual Persons. So the next step is to stitch together their familial connections.
Switch to a Person view, select yourself and right-click to make yourself the Home Person. Add a “Family” from the Add menu and drag’n’drop yourself, your spouse and your children into place. Add another Family and drag’n’drop your parents and then yourself with your siblings. This builds a quick 3 generations to use for testing out face mapping. Then drag’n’drop some photos from your phone to your PC. Then drag them from Windows and drop them in the Media category.
Evidence. If you continue with genealogy, you will start to run into contradictory information. Different birth dates or death dates. Full name v. nicknames and contractions. Place names, etc. I recommend that for every “fact” that you record, record the source of the info. That way, when you are trying to determine what is the correct fact–possibly many years in the future–it will be infinitely easier to verify the currently recorded info v. the differing info that has come to light.
You mention starting from “notes”. They can certainly be your initial evidence. As you go along, you’ll have to assess what level of confidence you have in their accuracy.
Also, let me be Devil’s Advocate: Gramps is not great for beginners. The software is VERY flexible but that means YOU have to decide how you want to use it. Many of the reports have nearly INNUMERABLE options to choose from. YOU need to work through them and print samples to see whether you like the output or not. The default user interface is somewhat spartan but there are a number of add-ons that can drastically change the presentation. YOU have to decide which one fits your style of working the best. On and on…
If you select a commercial genealogy package, they tend to have “ONE RIGHT WAY” to record everything. If their way fits your style, you will waste a lot less time by following where they lead. The tradeoff is that you’ll probably find some things where you wish you were permitted to do it your way.
If I in your shoes, I would play around with a couple of packages before doing a lot of bulk data entry into any one of them. Enter 1 or 2 families and then see what you think of the user interface and reports. Try using Gedcom export and import to move data to another package and see what gets lost or mangled in the process.
That’s sound advice. Especially trying a couple platforms before comitting.
As @emyoulation points out, passing this on is the primary objective. Not only because of mortality, but also this is more of an obligation rather than a passion.
A large part of me just wants to scan and photograph everything, place it in some flat file hierarchical directories, share it on dropbox and be done with it. The latent archivist in me wants me to kick in an extra 25% and leave something a bit more meaningful. But it is only meaningful if someone else picks up the baton.
I can not suggest Gramps as an ideal tool for organizing albums of photos. But its an excellent accessory for for an album organizer.
The face detection does not work with Windows OS. And large numbers of Photos will overwhelm its minimal organizational systems for Media objects.
Some of the Photo organizers have both face detection and matching. But they only apply a name to the matched faces. There is no context for that name. Gramps can supplement that name with the relationship, age, event, and location context.
And since Gramps is open source, we can enhance how smoothly they integrate with each other.
That would be quick and simple. Especially as I’d gently suggest that your estimate of “kicking in an extra 25%” is a gross underestimate of the effort required to build a family tree around a large number of photos.
I too inherited lots of family history stuff on paper, plus many, many, photos some going back over 100 years. I too was a complete novice but I have a vague feel for how db systems work so I appreciated that Gramps was powerful and would therefore would have a fair learning curve. NB I also know almost nothing about Linux, and my coding skills are minimal. I’ve only ever used Windows applications.
Several years later I have a tree that works for me, but which would make a real genealogist cringe because it is hopelessly lacking in proper sources and citations. It also has very few photos in it because, as @emyoulation has already noted, Gramps is not a good tool for organising photos. You mentioned you had a Lightroom habit, use that to organise your photos.
My huge collection of photos mainly exists as physical media (prints, slides, negatives). Those that have be digitised are held a hierarchical folder structure on my PC’s data disk.
Our youngest son begged me to scan in all the photos that we inherited over the years. There was about 2000 in boxes and a suitcase. So I scanned them and filed them in a couple of folders designated to our main family lines. For simplicity I let the scanner create the file name so there would not be any duplicates. I used the Windows photo viewer to add meta data text to the picture file. I copied any written data on the picture, added a year if so noted and the names of people if I knew them.
The pictures are saved on a hard drive, a USB drive and Flickr. If you turn on the indexing on the hard drive, you can use the file browser to search the meta data. The searching also work on Flickr. I have loaded a few key pictures into gramps, only to enhance the profile.
