# Scraping genealogical web site to add or update a person **URL:** \ **Category:** Ideas\ **Created:** [November 10, 2020, 11:40pm UTC](https://gramps.discourse.group/t/scraping-genealogical-web-site-to-add-or-update-a-person/925 "2020-11-10T23:40:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![philhoward](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f04885/32.png) [@philhoward](https://gramps.discourse.group/u/philhoward)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2020, 11:40pm UTC](https://gramps.discourse.group/t/scraping-genealogical-web-site-to-add-or-update-a-person/925/1 "2020-11-10T23:40:20Z")
[move this over to ideas if it does not exist.] does Gramps have a means to scrape a web page about a person’s information and apply it to a person (create if not yet there) in the tree one is working on? for instance after i load my gedcom from Ancestry, i want to add some additional (about 30-40) people from Wikitree and Familysearch. ---
**Author:** ![Mattkmmr](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/gramps.discourse.group/mattkmmr/32/410_2.png) [@Mattkmmr](https://gramps.discourse.group/u/Mattkmmr)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 7:03am UTC](https://gramps.discourse.group/t/scraping-genealogical-web-site-to-add-or-update-a-person/925/2 "2020-11-11T07:03:09Z")
> [@philhoward](#): > > [move this over to ideas if it does not exist.] I changed the category to ideas. > [@philhoward](#): > > does Gramps have a means to scrape a web page about a person’s information and apply it to a person (create if not yet there) in the tree one is working on? for instance after i load my gedcom from Ancestry, i want to add some additional (about 30-40) people from Wikitree and Familysearch. There is an addon **[Web Connect Pack](https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Web_Connect_Pack)** which does searching websites, but I’m not aware of any addons scraping sites for information yet. ---
**Author:** ![emyoulation](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/gramps.discourse.group/emyoulation/32/67_2.png) [@emyoulation](https://gramps.discourse.group/u/emyoulation)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2020, 5:39pm UTC](https://gramps.discourse.group/t/scraping-genealogical-web-site-to-add-or-update-a-person/925/4 "2020-11-11T17:39:58Z")
Dave & I [recently revisited](https://gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=11890) the US WebConnect for link rot. And that lead to a bunch of fixed links & [new searches leveraging fuzzy dates](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=George&middlename=&lastname=Washington&birthyear=1732&birthyearfilter=1&deathyear=1799&deathyearfilter=1&orderby=b). (We also expanded the documentation so you could fix the searches yourself. Although your customization are not stored in an .ini and will get wiped out with the next Gramplet tweak.) I didn’t use that WebConnect tool before but I CERTAINLY use it a lot now. But we also discovered that it needs some love from a Python coder. We didn’t see a way to pass some parameters to make the websearching URLs. For instance, you can easily insert searching for first, last names, birth or death year. But _ **if** _ there is a way to insert a maiden name (or a custom attribute or Citation Page Number) then it isn’t clear how to reference those fields. You can’t search using other Category values… like searching a library for a Source’s Title or Author. And if you configure Source web resources like WikiTree, FamilySearch, FindAGrave, HathiTrust, internet archive; you can not insert the WikiProfileID, profileID, memorialID, catalogRecordID, external-identifier into the PageNumber in a Citation and use Webconnect as a linkrot resistent way to reference online resources. ---
**Author:** ![Elhoom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a8b319/32.png) [@Elhoom](https://gramps.discourse.group/u/Elhoom)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2024, 11:54am UTC](https://gramps.discourse.group/t/scraping-genealogical-web-site-to-add-or-update-a-person/925/7 "2024-10-17T11:54:54Z")
Hey, Gramps itself doesn’t have a built-in feature for scraping web pages to automatically add or update people in your family tree. You’d likely need to create a custom script using **Python** with libraries like **BeautifulSoup** or **Scrapy** to extract the data from Wikitree or Familysearch, then format it properly to import into Gramps. Good luck!