Genealogy Open Source Software- Introducing GRAMPS

The Holiday season is a time for friends and family. The endless food and cheer have REALLY shown their effects this year! :)

Visiting grandma and seeing my parents and siblings is a reminder that time is precious. In speaking with grandma I found myself more intrigued this year with family history. Grandma is in her 90s. What valuable memories will she take with her? Can I do something to capture the most important ones?

I started thinking about the family history. A quick search turned up some fascinating software to help organize the family tree. The software is called GRAMPS - this description from the site:

GRAMPS is a genealogy program for Linux and other UNIX-like systems. The GRAMPS name stands for Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System.

GRAMPS helps you track your family tree. It allows you to store, edit, and research genealogical data. GRAMPS attempts to provide all of the common capabilities of other genealogical programs, but, more importantly, to provide an additional capability of integration not common to these programs. This is the ability to input any bits and pieces of information directly into GRAMPS and rearrange/manipulate any/all data events in the entire data base (in any order or sequence) to assist the user in doing research, analysis and correlation with the potential of filling relationship gaps.

GRAMPS currently runs on Linux, BSD, and Solaris. Some experiments are being made running it on Windows. For more information about getting GRAMPS, see the download page.

The thing I like most about learning Linux is that there is a program for most anything. The GRAMPS software does just what I need and likely much more. It's stable, downloadable, and free. Somehow I feel less apprehensive to experiment with software tools on Linux. Perhaps I just haven't been burned yet.

This would be nice software to facilitate a Social Studies project in family history. How many Linux computer labs are out there in our schools??

If anyone can help with some online resources that are FREE to help research family history, I'd be interested in hearing from you.

Tags: Linux, open source software, genealogy