Sharing datasets with Gramps?

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Can a DVD or USB thumbdrive containing genealogical data be created with an operational Gramps (for all 3 OSes: Linux/Windows/macOS) and pointing at the same database table? (Windows GrampsPortable and the macOS being a drag’n’drop install would seem to make those ‘no-brainers’. But what about Linux?)

In 1999, one of the Historical Societies for the county adjacent to my hometown produced a CD with some 120,000 inscriptions from their county’s 150+ cemeteries. The CD contains the transcribed data from 16 volumes of booklets published in 1980. (Another person compiled a hardcopy master surname index for that dataset, also in 1999. Hopefully using that Works database rather doing redundant work.)

However, they were burned by selecting the MS Works database as the platform. Of course, MS discontinued that suite of tools only a decade later in 2009.

Since this is data needed for my Ancestors and is more verified than the online services, I intend to convert the data from Works into a fresh Tree and export a GEDCOM that will be useful to for them to distribute again. (Although it is probably worth waiting for GEDCOM7, with its better Place structure.)

Distributing an operational Gramps database with the data would be more understandable for elder genealogists than just the GEDCOM.

Is a multi-platform Gramps distribution a reasonable goal?

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A Linux live DVD/USB seems like a good solution for this.

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Good thing GEDCOM7 export from Gramps is probably some ways away. It will give me time to learn about making Linux and making the basic Gramps LiveCD.

There are a bunch of Linux Live CD projects.

Reading the 2010 docs indicates that it only support x86 architecture, Ubuntu Meercat and the Gramps 3.2.5 releae. I haven’t yet found the explicit statement of which LiveCD project fathered our project’s.

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Perhaps, if they are already familiar with Gramps; but are you expecting them to reboot their computer from the DVD or USB? Or you want something they can simply execute? Why not just create a Narrated Web Site and put that on the DVD or USB?

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“Simply execute” is obviously preferred. Which is doable with the Win and macOS versions. But I don’t know if that was an option with the wide variants of Linux distros. Is it?

If they cannot use Gramps, users can always import the GEDCOM into another program they prefer. The idea is to share reusable base data that required re-keying nothing. But the other thought is that Gramps could be used to filter export subsets. (Given that dataset having about 120,000 persons distributed across more than 140 cemeteries might be too big for some other tools.)

There have been a number of tweaks to Gramps that will help the absolute novice in 5.2 version. Since I’m talking about distributing a ready-to-run variant, then I can add some other tweaks. Like using the Themes addon to set an increased point size to at least 12pt for older users, labels enabled on toolbar, a different initial set of Dashboard gramplets, a few extraneous built-in options disabled (Too many Navigator mode choices. The “drop-down” is the most explicit and so best for newbies.) Plus defaulting to Dark Mode would make it look more modern and different for people who might have seen Gramps and have a prejudice.

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Have you tried working with this dataset on your laptop? I have larger ones here, on similar hardware, but I often switch to RootsMagic for speed, especially when it comes to relationship calculations, or finding duplicates.

What I mean to say is that working with large datasets may not be a good way to show the greatness of Gramps.

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It sounds like you have conflicting objectives. It appears you want to format and store this information in a way that will be accessible for many years (say, more than 10). But you also want to provide an application that will run on a wide variety of (current) computers that allows easy searching and selection for subsets of the data.

It seems highly unlikely to me that any current application is going to be easily executable in 10+ years. CD and DVD as a storage medium seems to be on the way out and has been for some years. Who knows if Gedcom7 will be relevant then? So far, I would argue that the simplest data formats have had the longest lifespan–something like comma-separated values in a text file.

Does the Historical Society desire to make money from selling this data? If not, could it be hosted by something like the Internet Archive?

Craig
I’m trying to imagine a CD of such data being accessed in the Apple VisionPro spatial computing environment! :wink:

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Oh, definitely. And probably more ulterior motives than I’m consciously aware of too!

The dataset would be in GEDCOM. With a rough dialect in streamlined CSV, and a more intricate one in .gramps XML. And then predigested in Gramps as a previewer.

With more luck than I expect and continuing with even more grandiose vision than reality supports, it will have an .iso of the old Works-based CD and PDFs of the original 16 booklets.

And possibly metadata repleat photos of the entrance for each cemetery.

And maybe even a Narrative Web report of the data.

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I keep having visions of the historian’s dream VR workroom… where different fonds re-populate a organization that transforms back & forth between the warm and inspiration library patterned after the library at Skywalker Ranch and the cold science of a Tony Stark research lab. With J.A.R.V.I.S., StarTrek’s Mr.Atoz, Her’s Samantha and ReadyPlayerOne’s Curator as AI assistants.

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Historical Societies are still largely run by people whose formative years pre-dated microcomputers.

This particular Society had a friendly and open-minded executive director for 23 years but he died in 2021. Over the last couple years, much of what he had accomplished was dismantled by a defacto successor who was just ousted. Their domain, website data and Facebook page were even killed off.

Now some rebuilding can begin.

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I don’t even have the Works-format data yet. And expect 150,000 people with burials, inscriptions, birth & death info … and possible family relationships to be likely to push the reasonable performance limits.

But platform hardware keeps getting bigger and faster. So it may be less of an issue by the time its ready for distribution. And RootsMagic isn’t freely distributable.

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I understand what you’re saying, but in my experience, many genealogists don’t have the latest in hardware, meaning that they may have laptops older than yours or mine, on which Gramps may be quite slow with a dataset this large. I have bigger ones myself, including one with Charlemagne, and even Lilith, with more than 600,000 people in it, and running check & repair on that is quite a drag, and using the deep connections Gramplet even more.

When I import this same GEDCOM in PAF, which is what it was made on, I can even view it on an old laptop with Windows 2000 and 64 MB RAM, where it’s faster than on this one in Gramps, with 8 GB.

I often use RootsMagic Essentials to work with this tree, and that program is free. And I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to distribute that. I have loads of old DVD’s and thumb drives with trial versions of commercial software on it, issued by a local association, and I’ve never seen any problem with that way of software distribution. I’d rather think that companies like it.

I mention RootsMagic because it’s faster than anything else on the market, and very useful when you want to find duplicates in your dataset, for which it has a user interface that is very similar to the one in Gramps, where duplicate persons are ranked, and it is at least 10 times faster than Gramps, and more user friendly. And for paying users the program has a built-in gazetteer which is based on a table that lives outside your tree, and which is way more user friendly than ours.

The program is not open source, I know, but its database is more accessible than ours, because it’s fully normalized, and SQLite based.

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With Windows and Mac it’s easy to copy all of the necessary files to the USB, since the installations are self-contained. (See this earlier post for Mac; hopefully Windows is just as simple?.)

I don’t know about Linux, but do you think that any of your target audience are Linux users? And if so, wouldn’t they be comfortable just installing Gramps?

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Not nearly so simple for the main Windows fork. The PortableApps fork is drag’n’drop but only has a 32bit version for broadest compatibility. The 32bit has been dropped in favor of the 64bit for the PortableApps Gramps 5.1.6 release.

A modern LiveCD would be nice a recovery option too. I’m enough of a Linux noob that I’m likely to toast the system at some point.

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