Are you having problems with your genealogy research? Do you need some help organizing it? You can get some assistance from Gramps. No, I don’t mean that you should make your grandfather do your filing for you. Gramps is the name of a piece of genealogy software.
Relatives that are a few generations ahead of you are excellent resources when it comes to family history. They can tell you stories about what their childhood was like. It could be very different from yours! This is a great way to learn what day to day life was like during interesting points of history that happened before you were born.
Unless your grandfather happens to be an awesome amateur genealogist, or had a beloved career as a secretary who filed paperwork all day, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest enlisting him to organize your genealogy research for you. He might not appreciate having to do so much work! Instead, you may want get some help from Gramps.
Gramps is a piece of genealogy software that you can download for free. It is an open source software project that can be added to and improved by anyone who has the technical capability to do so.
It was originally designed for Linix and UNIX-like operating systems. You can also use it on Windows and Mac OSX at this time. People who work on improving Gramps use free tools and services from sourceforge. The latest version of Gramps is version 3.3.0.
Genealogists can use Gramps to record information about your ancestor’s lives, as well as how each ancestor relates to the others. It has a lot of different features that you can play around with. “Gramplets” gives you a dashboard that lets you easily monitor the progress of your research.
You can view a list of all of the individual people who are in your records through the “People” feature. “Relationships” will show you how one specific person relates to everyone else. You can tell Gramps to give you details about a specific family within your family tree. Or, you can make a family tree within the software.
There is a feature in the software that keeps track of all the web addresses, physical addresses, and email contact information that you used in your genealogy research. You can also add photos, videos, or other media to Gramps.
Gramps is open sourced, which means that clever and talented people could create new features that can be added to the software in the future. There is potential that someone will improve upon the way the software works so that things flow better, or make more sense in the future. If you happen to be a genealogist who also enjoys tinkering with software, then Gramps could be a lot of fun to try!
Image by Lainey Powell on Flickr