Who’s in your family tree? A famous novelist? A movie star of the 1920s? A king or a queen? A soldier in the Civil War? A pioneer who crossed the plains in a covered wagon? A prospector? A beet farmer? A Finnish programmer and operating system inventor?
Tracing your family’s history is fun, informative, and a great way to understand more about yourself. Fortunately for Penguinheads, there’s a great genealogy program that makes the entire process easy: GRAMPS (supposedly an acronym for Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System, but it smells suspiciously like a backronym; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym).
You can download the software from the GRAMPS web site, at http://gramps-project.org. Unfortunately, the only options available are RPM, Slackware, and source packages, but finding a Debian package isn’t too hard, especially since GRAMPS is included with most distributions nowadays.
When you start GRAMPS for the first time, you’ll want to create a new database to store all of your family’s data. Or, if you’re making a move from Family Tree Maker or another Windows- based genealogy programs, GRAMPS can import data stored in the GEDCOM format, which is supported by virtually every genealogy application. Now you’re ready to start adding people and other information into GRAMPS. If you’ve never worked on your family tree, it’s a very good idea to first read “Genealogy Basics,” located on the GRAMPS web site, as it contains many great ideas and some warnings.
GRAMPS is simple to…
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