Hi guys, lets discuss one interesting thing for Gramps (I think )
Every nation has great events in its history. For example, wars, famines, mass migrations. When we examine our family as a whole or an individual family member, we need to understand the environment in which he lived. For example, we need to understand the reason why he moved to live in another place - because of mass migrations or because of the government program to create factories and factories in cities … When we write an autobiography, we must also combine the person’s life and the state of affairs in the region at that moment.
What I propose for Gramps.
Create events which are identical to already implemented but with relationship to a place. If person is located inside of this place in the same date range as the event we will show this event in reports for this person.
I would not be qualified or have the time to research these significant worldwide events.
I would want to download a database with this information and have it automatically accessed (when the option is selected) to include the information.
I don’t have the answers but this issue does interest me. One problem is that ‘significant events’ may be local, regional, national or international. For example, suppose some ancestors live in a particular small town and there is a fire that destroys the downtown. By and large, only the people living in that place or nearby would be affected.
A real example is that several of my ancestors where living in what was then Upper Canada (near Kingston, ON) in the 1830s. Despite the War of 1812 ending about 20 years previously there was an armed raid by Americans that caused quite the local stir. A militia was formed and one of my ancestors with military experience helped lead it. At least 2 of his nephews joined. I have the raid event shared amongst all the adults that I know where living in that area. And military service events for those that joined. Even so, it is kind of a disjointed way to ‘tell the story’.
At the other end of the scale, international events like the world wars, the Great Depression, etc. also had impacts on people. It would be beyond tedious to have to create events for each and every person/adult/family living in those times.
I guess I would like to be able to import or create various lists of international, national or local events and somehow easily show that they may have had an influence of particular families. How to do that in a simple and easy-to-manage workflow is well beyond my pay grade!
It’s already possible to create Events for a given Place and Date(s) without any People attached to them, and @Mattkmmrsuggested a new timeline report to include such Events.
I think it would be good if such a report could also recognize when a Place is enclosed by more than one other Place. Suppose currently a town is enclosed by a county which is enclosed by a state, etc. Now suppose the town were also enclosed by a Place representing a watershed (“Lower Mississippi River”) enclosed by a broader geographical category, etc., eventually enclosed by a continent and then the planet. This would be useful for locating natural events, such as floods, that may occur in areas spanning multiple parts of a typical (political) Place hierarchy.
Then I could have a “Flood” event linked to a such a geographical Place, and the report could identify the people living in all of the the political Places which are directly or indirectly enclosed by the geographical place.
I think this does not require any new functionality; a Place can already be enclosed by more than one other Place. It just requires reports to make use of the information. Of course, it also requires some knowledge and discretion for deciding which political places are enclosed by which geographical places. For example, I could say it’s good enough for my purposes to say that particular states are enclosed by a watershed, or with more effort I could do it at the county or even the township level. Personally I would only do it as needed to support whatever events I am interested in. (And only if there were a report available!)
If the developers implement “Places subjects for Events” or Event for Places (two phrases same thing), and maybe also Main-/Sub-Events, we will be able to create these types of timelines… and in addition you can add your People and Families as participants of those Events, even though the Place is the primary subject for the event.
With a “little” tuning of the csv import/export, we would also be able to import csv lists with historical data.
Of course, developers will have to create some new reports and views in addition, both text and graphic report…
For those Events that are historical milestones with no people related, a normal filter should work…
Another option might be to clone the Person category’s Timeline addon QuickView Report and modify it to add the intersecting Filtered Events with the Person’s lifespan.
So you might have the Event Filter be set to Zero Reference Events in a Certain Region. Or Events with a particular Attribute. Or in a CSV file as mentioned earlier.
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