Was Gramps your first?

Genealogy
21

Yes I did start with Gramps (~15 years ago), when my then-ill aunt passed me her paper archives.
Since, I have subscribed to several commercial services like Geneanet and Ancestry, for their matching-with-other-trees services. They’ve been quite useful to me for the branches in other countries.

One warning to new users selecting a software, should be that IME all commercial services try their darnedest to lock in their customers, so provide only minimal ways to port your data elsewhere. You are effectively pretty much their prisoner after you have over a few thousand people in your tree. Their marketing knows this and tend to milk the herd…
I always keep my database on my PCs in Gramps, and only copy
Now support-wise, IME the quality of response by the Gramps community is way above that of paying sites. The service staff try their best, but the level of competence is is not nearly the same (commercial companies do not ‘waste’ highly competent tech staff on user support).

Let’s not be shy: Gramps is not only the smartest-designed genealogy app, it is also the best supported and one of the most user-friendly. And it won’t lock you in like the commercial ones.

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22

Gramps is my third program. Started with GedView (an app) on an iPod in 2010, and not long after began using PhpGedView. In 2012 or early 2013 I started using Gramps and have used it ever since.

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23

I started with Gramps after researching some alternatives. I wanted something offline, where I would own all data. Also, Gramps proved to have one of the most expansive data models, and its own file format allows exchanging that (whereas GEDCOM is really basic in that regard). I looked at some self-hosted web-based solutions as well but did not feel like actively managing a deployment with all the updates that come with it (as much as I do that professionally, did not want that for a hobby site). Additionally Gramps’ own built-in web publication turned out to be rather simple and a bit out of date (no shame, a desktop app and web functionality are both two different, challenging things!). In the end I decided to use Gramps for data collection and management, and build https://betty.readthedocs.io/ for web publication.

I like Gramps, but I think the UX could use a major refresh. One of my main pet peeves is the lack of proper keyboard accessibility, which means most actions require a mouse and that is literally a pain (in the hand) when doing batch work.

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24

What about data? Blank page, a gedcom or paper files from somewhere? Something else?

Craig

25

I started with a small stack of papers that a friend of the family had assembled some twenty years prior, and from then on it was digging through online archives. I’m interested in provenance so being able to keep citations is a major asset for me.

A second major drawback for me is that Gramps’ own file formats are not quite as stable and consistent as one would hope, and DTDs are harder to read than XML schemas. However I’m hoping to avoid all that by refactoring Betty’s current parsing of Gramps XML into integrating with Gramps’ Python APIs directly.

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