When we’re kids, we learn stories of the past from our grandparents, often involving their parents and grandparents. How many of you remember those stories? What about the names of the people involved? Those of you with your hands up, are you into genealogy? I’ve been working on it for a couple of years now, and I just love this program, GRAMPS. GRAMPS stands for “Genealogical Research & Analysis Management Programming System.” That’s a mouthful, though, so it’s GRAMPS. GRAMPS is available for Linux, Windows, OSX, BSD, and Solaris, but the Linux versions are generally the most up-to-date.

If you’re a genealogy enthusiast and you’ve used software to track your records before, you’re probably familiar with the GEDCOM format. The thing I loved about GRAMPS to begin with was that it worked directly with the GEDCOM. Nowadays it does have its own format available, but it can still use the GEDCOM directly. It also automatically backs up the file when you save, so if you screw up royally, you have a checkpoint.

As with any genealogy program, you can enter names, dates, places, etc. One of the features I like is that you can set the quality of the dates to regular, estimated, or calculated and also include that it was before, after, or about a certain time. I find this useful when I’m going through census records and figuring out “So she was 20 in May 1873, meaning she was either born in early 1853 or late 1852…” since I can’t really be properly accurate without something like a birth certificate. You can also create an event, like a ship arriving at port, just once and link multiple people to it. The list of events you can choose is extensive. There are definitely more options than what I recall Personal Ancestry File having and if you find yourself thinking, “wow James and Joseph sure named their kids a lot of similar na—oh…they’re the same person…crap,” there’s a tool to merge people as well.

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