AlexH

I recently installed GRAMPS v2 to start tracking my family tree. I have an interest in this because I am the last male heir of a large branch of my family tree, and there is pressure to pass on my last name to a male son. Since I don’t have any kids yet, I’d like to find some other people that share my last name, Harford. I’m going to get all of my data entered into GRAMPS before I go looking for relatives on the Internets because the chances of lining up branches increases as I add more information.

GRAMPS is a very easy to use and feature-rich product for Linux that tracks all of your family tree data. I’ve never used any other genealogy software before, but this one is straightforward and easy to use.

One thing I liked is that it prompts you to enter related information as you go along. For example, when I added Tracy as my spouse, it popped up a window to enter the wedding information, which I did, then continued with the rest of my data entry.

It also lets you flag data as private (I don’t really want to publish my living relatives’ birthdays for example) and I’m going to test out how well that works when exporting data.

A missing feature (or one that I haven’t found yet) is the automatic export of the family tree data to a web page, but since it exports XML it should be very simple. dot (part of the graphviz package) should be able to handle this easily. I’ve found a PHP application called PhpGedView that should be able to handle this as well.

In terms of merging family trees, I think I will use the Ancestry.com Trees service to find other branches. There is a 14 day trial that I’ll sign up for once I get the tree done. A year’s subscription costs $49.95 US which is a bit steep, but hopefully I wouldn’t be locked in to their service if I find other branches that line up.