Genealogy is a burgeoning hobby and to help the home genealogist, a whole range of software is available. Much of it is commercial but here I’ll look at one of the most popular free software options—GRAMPS. Charting your family history needn’t mean compromising on licensing.

Finding your roots

Genealogy, the study of one’s ancestry, is a growing industry. Fuelled by on-line resources like Ancestry.com [3] and television programs like the BBC’s “Who do you think you are”, thousands of people are to be found scouring web sites, visiting graveyards in remote locations and ordering obscure birth certificates all in the name of tracing their roots.

Genealogy is highly addictive…you can easily find yourself staring bleary-eyed at the computer at 3am

If you have ever considered tracing your ancestry, there are a few things to note: it takes time, it can create huge amounts of data and it’s highly addictive. Once you start you can easily find yourself staring bleary-eyed at the computer at three in the morning trying to figure out if the person you’ve just found is the same one you are related to. I should also say that it can be highly rewarding—especially when you amaze your relatives with the details of their family history.

From data to trees

Managing all that information suggests a database and while it is possible to create your own, there exists an array of software which can ease the task of turning the data you have gathered into a family tree. Much of this is commercial although it is generally at a reasonable cost. Of course, for those who prefer their software to be free there are several applications available [4] and of these GRAMPS is arguably the most popular. GRAMPS stands for Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System. A name which makes me wonder if the acronym or the full name came first.

Before I plunge into the details of installing and using GRAMPS, take a look at some of the functionality that it provides, as available from the sidebar as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: The standard GRAMPS interface showing a pedigree

• People: The bedrock of all Genealogy software. In GRAMPS you can store people’s names (birth, marriage and others), multiple addresses (with dates) and events (e.g. marriage, emigration).
• Families: People are automatically grouped by last name, you can also link them by relationship to each other. Thus allowing you to produce family tree style reports.
• Pedigrees: A visual, interactive layout of a family tree.
• Sources: During research the genealogist will gather information from many sources. GRAMPS allows you to record these sources so that you can find which have proved the most useful over time and waste less time by starting future searches there.
• Places: It’s likely that you’ll be entering similar locations several times within the database. GRAMPS allows these locations to be stored as records in their own right, allowing you to track popular areas.
• Media: You can store various typed of media file against records, including photographs, scans of documentation, videos, audio—pretty much any file.
• Reports: There’s a plethora of report formats and styles available.

Taking your first steps

As with most free software, there are many ways to install GRAMPS ranging from roll-your-own (download and build from sources)—to the more sedate distribution specific packages. As far as I know packages exist for most of the major GNU/Linux distributions. GRAMPS is available for both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD but I’ll review from the GNU/Linux perspective here and in particular Debian and Ubuntu. That’s because—quite honestly—it’s what I use myself. I also use KDE although this is of little importance here as GRAMPS uses both the GTK and GNOME libraries and presents a GNOME interface regardless of your desktop preference. For this reason if you use KDE you may need to install some GTK and GNOME library packages as well although any good package manager, such as Synaptic, will assist with these dependencies.

GRAMPS presents a GNOME interface regardless of your desktop preference

If you are a command-line person then apt-get install gramps will do the trick. For the GUI people among us, I’ll concentrate on Synaptic. Simply search for gramps, mark it by checking the box beside it’s name and click on Apply. See Marco Marongiu’s piece on Synaptic in Issue 11 for more detailed information on using it. If you are using Ubuntu, ensure you have the “universe” repository included in Repositories (under the Settings menu). Don’t forget to click Reload (or apt-get update) before you search though. In both Debian and Ubuntu GRAMPS is in the GNOME section of packages.

If you are using Debian stable (at the time of writing this is 3.1r2/Sarge) then you will find your version of GRAMPS is 1.0.11-1. This article is referencing the more recent 2.0.11-1 found in the testing (Etch) and unstable (Sid) Debian distributions.

Finally, if you are stuck with a proprietary operating system but still want to try GRAMPS, then why not try the Linux Genealogy Desktop CD [2]. This is a live CD based on Ubuntu and will run without installing anything on your hard disk, although you can do so from the CD if you wish.

Using GRAMPS

When you first start GRAMPS you are greeted by a database dialog window where you can choose between opening a recent database, browsing for an existing one (which has dropped off the recent files list) or creating a new one. Once you open a database or create a new one, you are brought to the main GRAMPS interface with the ubiquitous “tip of the day” pop-up.