I am looking for a program that can be used to build a family tree of a large group of people who are not actually relatives: example - members of a basketball or baseball team, musicians or politicians.
An athlete will move from high school teams to college teams then on to professional teams. I’d like to build a database that would show the history of an athlete (or a musician or a politician). Then we could see who all they played on a team with or worked with throughout the years - is this possible with Gramps? Does this make sense?
To do this I would suppose that category names might need to be customizable (instead of mother, father, home - maybe instead Team, Position, School or Instrument, Record Label, Band).
Let’s also say a person moves from law school, practice, district attorney, Mayor, Govenor then Congress - or a baseball player is part of a World Series team…?
I appreciate your help with my outside-of-the-box idea.
A person asked about adapting Gramps to track athlete careers and politician careers. While Gramps is adaptable enough to do that (but would need a lot of custom reports to be useful), I wonder if tools don’t already exist for this sort of public figure data amalgamating?
While Gramps is a genealogy software that could potentially be adapted for tracking athlete or politician careers, there are indeed more specialized tools designed for managing data about public figures. These tools are often referred to as “knowledge bases” or “entity management systems.” Here are some options that might be more suitable:
Wikidata: This is a free, collaborative, multilingual knowledge base that can be edited by anyone[1]. It’s particularly well-suited for tracking public figures, including athletes and politicians, as it allows for structured data entry and complex queries.
Airtable: A flexible, spreadsheet-database hybrid that allows for custom fields and relationships between data points. It could be easily adapted to track career milestones, achievements, and other relevant information for athletes or politicians[2].
Semantic MediaWiki: An extension to MediaWiki (the software that powers Wikipedia) that allows for structured data within wiki pages. This could be used to create a custom knowledge base for tracking public figures[3].
ResearchSpace: A more specialized tool designed for cultural heritage institutions but adaptable for tracking complex relationships and timelines, which could be useful for politician or athlete career tracking[3].
Graph databases like Neo4j: These are particularly well-suited for modeling complex relationships, which is often necessary when tracking public figures’ careers and connections[3].
While these tools exist, it’s worth noting that there might not be a perfect out-of-the-box solution for tracking athlete or politician careers specifically. The best approach would likely involve adapting one of these more general-purpose tools to the specific needs of tracking public figure data.
Think of a Team as a Place. The Place can be any Institution, and you would use the hierarchy to group them
USA > Massachusetts > Boston > Boston Celtics
> Boston Symphony
> Judicial Court
> Supreme Judicial Court
> U.S. Congress
> U.S. Olympic Team > Basketball
> Gymnastics
People are People and you can add Events with a time span from <date> to <date> with the place being whichever Institution/Place they were with. The Description field could be the position they played or their instrument.
Place reports can tell you who played for which team when.
And you might actually need the Family relationships. Doesn’t LaBron James’ son now play pro basketball?
Instead of a span of time when a player was on a team (or a member of an orchestra) maybe make each event a Season and then share the same event with the other players on the team. This would allow for easier recognition of a Championship Season.
Wow ! Thank you for all the helpful answers. I’ve just finished downloading Gramps and am planning on spending most of the weekend getting familiar with it. You all are the best !