Was Gramps your first?

Genealogy
1

Did anyone here start their family history journey with Gramps?

It comes up regularly that we should make Gramps easier for new users. Generally, people seem to assume this means people who are brand-new to genealogy.

I would submit that Gramps deserves to be your last genealogy software. It is powerful and flexible but comes with no small learning curve. The former justifies the latter.

Folks that are brand new to genealogy should probably start with one of the commercial packages. Those packages are expressly designed for ease of use and offer new-user support that is well beyond what this project is capable of. A lot of these people are going to dabble and decide they want to do other things instead. Some will continue and choose to stay with the commercial package they know. Thatā€™s all fine.

On the other hand, some will become disenchanted with their first software and will look for alternatives that offer flexible and powerful ways to record and present family history the way they want. Gramps still needs to be easy to use but we donā€™t need to spend finite resources trying to entice first-time, blank-page users.

Perhaps Iā€™m wrong but I think that pretty much the only new users that start with Gramps are either dedicated to FOSS (to the exclusion of commercial options) or have a considerable database/IT background. Or both.

Gramps does not need market share. We do not ā€œloseā€ if new users donā€™t choose Gramps. I think Gramps should ā€˜lean-intoā€™ being the genealogy software you donā€™t outgrow. ā€œStart wherever you want. Gramps will be there when youā€™re ready.ā€

So, again, how many of you started with Gramps?

Craig
(I started with a program called Gene in the early 1990ā€™s. Its limitations became apparent over a few years which led me to think a lot about what I wanted. Which led to Gramps.)

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I did start with Gramps. At least the part of the journey with a database rather than hand-generating static webpages. Sure, there was an abortive review and immediate rejection of primitive software in 1988. But that lasted less than an hour as it was so painful and limited to less than a hundred people when working with micro-floppy disks. Anyone could do more (and more quickly) with a 3-ring binder and 3 photocopied blank paper forms: a (3-5 generation variants) pedigree form, a family group sheet and a research log sheet.

It was NOT my intent to get into digital genealogy. I just wanted to untangle the convoluted data in a 24 page booklet on the Locke lineage from 1924.

And youā€™re correct that Gramps does not need market share. But it does need more depth and breadth in the talent pool of volunteers. The community needs people designing more reports and analysis tools. We need a pool of UX/UI people coming up with new and innovative data-entry methods and handling Gtk toolkit evolution. Gramps needs people to take tedious load off the core team so they can be creative. We need to grow the number of experienced people who can jump in when there is turnover/burnout in key positions.

The potential people who can grow into these positions have the skills to spot easily fixable flaws in the first 5 minutes. They see them, say ā€œoh, hell noā€ and bail out. If these leaks to the filling of our talent pool can easily be patched, then ā€¦ why not?

And it is very disconcerting when very experienced users feel compelled to consistently recommend other software over Gramps. Like Enno does with RootsMagic. And more disconcerting that his reasoning is justifiable.

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My first genealogy software was actually Legacy. I found it for my mother so that she could more easily conduct her family research. Since I was always her ā€œsuperuser,ā€ I had to learn Legacy thoroughly.

Back then, Legacy was not translated, so I hacked it and translated the GUI and most reports into Norwegianā€”about five years before they released their own well-translated version. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about the lack of UTF-8 support and a few other issues.

I also tested out RootsMagic, PAF, Ancestries, bought a license for Clooz 1, used Freeplane

When my mother passed away, I continued the research. However, I soon encountered information related to the Norwegian Mercantile Fleet during both World War I and World War II, which required software with fewer limitations.

This was when the first Gramps 5.0 Alpha or Beta was released, but I couldnā€™t get the AIO and add-ons (gramplets) installed on my Windows computer; I encountered tons of errors. So, I started searching for alternative software and tools. I now have close to 2,500 research software options registered in a Zotero database, most of which I have tested or tried out over a period of two to three yearsā€”everything from Twine Storyteller software to Freeplane, Palladio, MongoDB, and Neo4j.

After some time, I managed to get nearly everything in Gramps working without crashes and found almost everything I was looking for in this software. However, I identified four main limitations:

  • A network graph view that included events, places, and sources, with links for any type of relationship.
  • A better, more historically accurate way of registering events, which I call ā€œMain/Sub-Events.ā€
  • Events on places where people could be linked as participants to a place-centric event.
  • Better source and citation handling, utilizing, for example, CSL or at least a way to interchange sources and citations from a bibliography software like Zotero or JabRef, or BibTeX, using CSL JSON, BibLaTeX, RIS, or similar file formats for interchangeable bibliography data.
  • Export and import from at least one commonly used network graph or knowledge graph open-source, open-data format, or at least a full export to CSV, so that data could be more easily exchanged with other research tools often used in historical research.

After a while, I started testing Obsidian because of its graph view and found the Neo4j plugin for that software. At the same time, I got the MongoDB DB-API for Gramps working on my Windows PC, so I created a link between the MongoDB database and Neo4j, combining my research notes in Obsidian with my Gramps database in MongoDB, using Neo4j as a ā€œhub.ā€ Then, MongoDB did an update, and the original MongoDB API no longer worked.

I hired a Python developer to create an export script to Excel, and then I developed some VBA in Excel that converted all the Gramps data I had in tables to Markdown, so I could still use it in Obsidian and FOAM.

Today, I only use Gramps as an archive tool/system; all my research is done in Zotero, Obsidian, FOAM for VSC, Gephi, Cytoscape, Tulip, Constellation, Aeon, QGIS, Clooz 4, OpenRefine, Tropy, and even Excel.

I still think Gramps is the absolute best genealogy software regarding features for registering and storing data, but I also believe Gramps can be a really good historical research tool with the aforementioned features. With a wider user base, especially in social and historical research, there will likely be some experienced Python and/or R users/developers who might start contributing to the project and maybe even have some ideas for other useful views and reports.

It will be easier to create some ā€œbridgesā€ to other software when Gramps 6 is released, but I think I will continue using my Markdown approach as a hub to tie other software to my data; it is so easy to create notes and then just link them to the object of interest in Gramps or other software I use. And maybe Iā€™ll get my new Python script/gramplet to work, so I can export both to Markdown and a network graph format with a configuration for my data and research the way I need it exported.

Gramps is maybe the very best and most flexible software for genealogy, but with relatively small changes, it can be much more versatile.

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Iā€™ve only ever used Gramps for my genealogy interests - Iā€™ve never tried other software. At the time I started, I was using Linux and it seemed a pretty powerful application. Nowadays Iā€™m using a Mac - still find it astonishingly capable (Iā€™d still like pdf thumbnails to work :slightly_smiling_face: ) so much so that I often discover things Iā€™d not noticed before. I actually enjoy figuring out complex software.

I often wonder if Iā€™m using it correctly, but it works really well for me. I generate narrated website views for family members to look into.

Recently I also set up GrampsWeb in a container on a Raspberry Pi for a single tree, but the instructions for multi-tree installations werenā€™t clear enough for me. Iā€™ve stuck with the Desktop version of Gramps for now.