Gramps

Description

Genealogy research can really add up: birth certificates, census records, immigration documents, marriage licenses, photographs, family stories that stretch across generations and geographic locations. Organizing that material in a spreadsheet or a word processor works for the first few relatives but breaks down as the tree grows to dozens of people connected by complex relationships. Gramps is a free, open source genealogy application that organizes family history research into a relational database — people, families, events, places, sources, and media — with tools for visualizing relationships, generating reports, and sharing findings.

The Gramps Project develops the application as a community-driven open source project, which is distributed under the GPL license. It is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, which means it is available across platforms without any subscription cost. The application stores data in an open XML format, making it accessible for the long term without proprietary format lock-in.

Gramps organizes research around People records and Family records as separate but linked entities. A Person record contains an individual’s name variations, birth and death and burial events, gender, biographical information, references to sources that support the recorded facts, and attached media files. A Family record connects two persons as partners and lists their children, documenting the family relationship type — married, unmarried, civil union — with supporting events and sources. This separation makes it possible to record complex family structures such as step-relationships, adoptions and multiple marriages accurately.

Events — births, deaths, marriages, military service, immigration, and any other events — are separate records that link to the people involved rather than being embedded directly in person records. This way it is possible to link more than one person to the same event (a marriage involves two people; a household appears in a single census event). Place records are used to store geographic information such as coordinates, address information, and name variations over time and link to the events that occurred at that location.

Gramps keeps track of the sources of each recorded fact using a structured citation system. A Source record describes an original document — a census record, a vital registration, a church register — with the repository where it’s held, the author, and bibliographic details. A Citation is a link between a specific piece of information in the Source and the fact that it supports. This evidence-based approach documents not only what is known about an individual but from where that information is derived and how reliable the source is.

Gramps offers several relationship visualization views. The Pedigree View displays a standard ancestor tree fanning out from a selected individual. The Descendant View displays all persons descended from a selected ancestor. The Fan Chart is a semicircular chart of ancestors. The Relationships View displays all relationships of the currently selected person in a list format. An interactive graph view displays the family structure as a network diagram with configurable display options.

The report engine produces printed and digital reports such as narrative genealogical reports in standard formats (Ahnentafel, Descendant Report), relationship charts and pedigree diagrams, statistical summaries of the contents of the database, and place-based reports listing events that occurred in each location. Reports export as PDF, HTML and text documents.

GEDCOM — Genealogical Data Communication — is the standard file format for exchanging family tree data between genealogy applications. Gramps imports and exports GEDCOM files, making it possible to exchange data with Ancestry, FamilySearch, Legacy Family Tree, and other genealogy software. The export has options to control what data is included, so privacy-conscious sharing can be done to exclude living individuals from exported files.

Photos, document scans, audio recordings and video files attach to Person, Family, Event and Place records as media objects. A media gallery view is provided that displays all attached files for a selected record, and the media manager is used to organize the complete media collection with tools for finding records with missing or unlinked media files.

Gramps supports plugins that extend the functionality of report generation, support for import/export formats, new visualizations, and data entry tools. The plugin manager is used to download and install community plugins from within the application.