Recently, Kris Hocker of Kris Hocker’s /genealogy wrote a post titled, Writing My Family Genealogy ~ A Long, Winding Path.
The topic of this post is the writing of a descendants book, and the difficulty in managing numbering in a word processor. This is one area where I think Gramps may excel, and I’d be surprised if other word processors didn’t have a similar feature.
Find a Grave provides a wealth of information that won’t be found anywhere else. You never know if searching for an ancestor will return a match, giving you the cemetery where your ancestor was buried. Often you’ll also find the birth and death years (possibly even dates), and checking the cemetery listing may return a few of your ancestor’s relatives. Even better, some pages will include a photograph of the gravestone. How should you manage this wealth of information in Gramps?
My family tree contains two types of people: sourced and unsourced. Every person without a source is marked as “private” and tagged as “unsourced” so that they do not “pollute” my family tree web site.
Gramps, my family tree software of choice, has a report option called “Number of Ancestors Report”. It generates the number of ancestors from each generation there are in a family tree. It lacks an option to exclude people marked as private. Below is a formatted version of the output report, which includes sourced and unsourced ancestors.
It’s been almost a year since I started with genealogy, and this first year has really gone all over the place for me. There were many times where it would have been nice to have a place to write about it, and that’s why I’ve started this blog.
Where has the first year taken me?