Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 16, 2014 20:43 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
Parent article: Genealogy research with Gramps

> (e.g., a "second cousin, thrice removed" in one culture is simply called a "brother" elsewhere)

Is this a real example? That's a second cousin's great grandchild (if I remember the rules correctly…).

> Internationalization is another major focus of Gramps, exploiting a niche that proprietary software makers tend to avoid.

This project's niche seems to be at the intersection of all kinds of hairy i18n problems. Names (with local script and Romanization variants), addresses changing over time, cultural differences (cousins living together vs. the more Western nuclear family), calendars (both across time and between countries), and I'm sure I'm missing more. Hats off on making it a priority to actually tackle the problem rather than just sweeping it under the (AmeriEuro-shaped) rug.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 16, 2014 21:30 UTC (Wed) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link] (13 responses)

I tried Gramps 4.0.3. I found a wide range of types of name available, thankfully (birth name, married name, also known as, fill-in-the-blank; and more for surname origin). However the only gender options were "male", "female" and "unknown" (no fill-in-the-blank). When creating a "Family", it did thankfully allow a one-parent family, but as far as I could tell it has a maximum of two parents and those parents cannot be the same sex.

It seems like it will need some work to be able to represent my people's families, unless I'm missing something. (I hope I am missing something because Gramps seems to have a lot of nice features.)

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 16, 2014 21:38 UTC (Wed) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link] (10 responses)

You can certainly create a family with two parents of the same sex, because I've done it. It may be that the interface currently labels one as "mother" and one as "father" but there's certainly no problem making those refer to people of the same sex.

There was some discussion of this issue on the mailing list recently so it is an issue people are aware of.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 11:07 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (9 responses)

> You can certainly create a family with two parents of the same sex,
> because I've done it. It may be that the interface currently labels one
> as "mother" and one as "father" but there's certainly no problem making
> those refer to people of the same sex.

I don't quite understand this. Yes, of course, somebodies legal parents can be of the same sex, but usually this isn't biological. I mean it's GENEalogy. Or can this actually be done, children with genetic material of both same-sex legal parents?

Speaking of which, how does Gramps cope with bastards?

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 11:18 UTC (Thu) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link] (7 responses)

The point is that a "family" is Gramps currently links two parents (one of which is labelled "mother" in the UI and the other is labelled "father" in the UI) to a list of children. There is also a relationship type (which has some predefined values like "married" but can be set to anything you like).

There is nothing stopping you assigning a male person to the "mother" slot or a female person to the "father" slot however, so that is how same sex relationships are normally handled at present. As I said there has been some talk of changing how those parents are labelled.

Each child in a family has fields for "relationship to father" and "relationship to father" which have predefined values like "birth", "adopted", "fostered" etc but again you can actually type in anything you like.

A bastard can simply be entered by creating a family with only one parent and assigning the child to it. If the second parent is known they can be assigned to the family but the family type set to "unmarried".

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 20:24 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

It is true that a person has two biological parents of opposite gender, who may or may not be known. They can have one or more legal parents of any gender. It seems a little restrictive to have only two fields.

Genealogy is the study of family history and so while biological parents are important, legal parentage is also important and shouldn't be ignored.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 0:01 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (4 responses)

while biological parents are important, legal parentage is also important and shouldn't be ignored

I would think social parentage is even more interesting that legal parentage. The fact that a person raised another person matters more to many people than the various things that legal parenthood signifies.

And there's no reason that relationship should be limited to one or two people.

They can have one or more legal parents of any gender

Is there any place where a person can have more than two legal parents?

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 0:32 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

Is there any place where a person can have more than two legal parents?

California has recently made it possible for someone to have more than two legal parents.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 1:07 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

not to mention that someone may have more legal parents over time, and as you are researching, it may not always be clear what the overlap for individuals is.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Aug 18, 2014 21:41 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Add to that, in the UK at least, legal adoption is very much a 20th-century practice. (And I think there is no limit to the number of adoptive parents a child can have. Plus, kids can be left in a will...)

I don't know whether legal adoption even existed before that, but it was very much the norm, if the wife died, any kids were given away (to family members if they were around, or to various charities if they weren't).

And quite often, if family circumstances changed, children that had been given away were taken back.

I suspect I'm quite lucky to know my family because, even then (back in the thirties) that practice was quite common, and my grandmother died when my father was two years old. Granddad remarried within the year, though, iirc, so that may have had something to do with it ...

Cheers,
Wol

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 3:04 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Lots of countries practice polygamy. Then there are adoptions - it's possible for someone to be orphaned and then adopted (possibly several times).

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Aug 3, 2014 15:26 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

A child and parents can be members of multiple "families" in Gramps, which covers for some of those use cases (although sometimes it would clearly be & look like a workaround/kludge...).

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 19:00 UTC (Thu) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link]

I wondered about whether genealogy was about genes. But I think that lots of people want to record adoptive family, among other things.

As for types of biological parentage:

Gestational surrogacy, where a baby is borne by someone other than the people who provided sperm and egg. Pregnancy even affects the mother's DNA.
A third parent can provide mitochondrial DNA to avoid a rare disease.
You might consider someone who regularly breastfeeds a child as a biological relation. They certainly transmit protective antibodies. Science doesn't have a full understanding of everything that breastfeeding does. Milk kinship is an idea in some cultures and it may have biological kinship effects.
There may be more types of biological parentage in the future - science is active in this area.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 12:53 UTC (Thu) by VPeric (guest, #74293) [Link] (1 responses)

In Gramps 4.1, the family view is by default labeled as "Father/partner1" and "Mother/partner2", specifically to support same-sex families. Multiple person families aren't supported, though - you could create several families I guess. You can also just have separate families (in a genealogical sense) and note using Address events that they lived together in a given time period.

You are also right about the genders, there's a GEP about it, but no final solution has been reached/programmed. I invite you to participate, in the discussion at least:

https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=GEPS_...
https://gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=5730

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 20:23 UTC (Thu) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link]

Oh excellent! Is one of the mailing-lists or IRC good, or a comment on #5730?

I looked for for the ability to add arbitrary parent-child relationships directly, without going to the Families tab first to turn someone into a potential parent. It seemed complicated to me to need a Family for that: although I see how it makes entering data much simpler for people who marry, have several children, and don't remarry.

In creating a family (now using Gramps 4.1.0), I was able to add anyone to a family but first had to check "Show all" and then click a "▸" to show people (clicking "show all" is not necessary if the people are the "correct" gender).

I tried making a time loop (A begets B begets C begets A)... and Gramps threw an exception! It should probably handle this more gracefully (either allow it or say "sorry, not supported") (Some discussion on whether this can happen in real life.) So I filed a bug report.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 8:44 UTC (Thu) by jnareb (subscriber, #46500) [Link]

Internationalization is another major focus of Gramps, exploiting a niche that proprietary software makers tend to avoid.
This project's niche seems to be at the intersection of all kinds of hairy i18n problems. Names (with local script and Romanization variants), addresses changing over time, cultural differences (cousins living together vs. the more Western nuclear family), calendars (both across time and between countries), and I'm sure I'm missing more. Hats off on making it a priority to actually tackle the problem rather than just sweeping it under the (AmeriEuro-shaped) rug.

It is not only local script vs. Romanization for names, and addresses changing over time, but also locale-specific details, for example what are parts of the name (how the name is composed) and parts of the address:

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 12:48 UTC (Thu) by VPeric (guest, #74293) [Link] (1 responses)

> Is this a real example? That's a second cousin's great grandchild (if I remember the rules correctly…).

Good point, I don't know what "second cousin, thrice removed" exactly is, it was a random example. But in my country, all people on the same "level" are your brothers/sisters, all people above are uncles/aunts, all people below are nephews; there is (essentially) no distinction if your last common ancestor is one or five generations away.

> i18n

Definitely right here, there's a lot of issues but a lot of care is given to it. I've found that I can always represent anything I need.

For example, in the new place model, places are arranged hierarchically. But, for each "part of" relationship, you can specify a date range; in this way, you can represent that a given city was part of that parish in that century, but a part of something else later, or country changes, or anything you wish. When marking strings for translation, care is given to support right-to-left languages as well. It's, of course, an ongoing process (and most developers are Western), but a lot of tiny things combine to offer a lot of flexibility.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Aug 12, 2014 1:55 UTC (Tue) by kevinm (guest, #69913) [Link]

The "thrice removed" part indicates that they're not on the same level, so that would be an uncle/aunt - niece/nephew relationship in your country.

(The "second cousin" bit indicates that the first common ancestor is a great-grandparent to the generationally older of the two).