Gramps (software)

Gramps, formerly GRAMPS (Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System), is free and open-source genealogy software. It is written in Python, uses PyGObject and GTK, and is developed by the Gramps project.

Gramps is designed for offline family-history research, including entry of people, families, events, sources, citations, places, media, and notes. It can generate reports and relationship graphs, supports plugins called Gramplets, and stores its archival exchange format as Gramps XML. It also includes special-use translation sets for contexts such as animal pedigrees and same-gender relationship reporting.

Gramps was created by Don Allingham and began as a Linux genealogy program named GRAMPS.^{[1] [2]} The project began in 2001, and the first stable 1.0 release was published in 2004.^{[4] [10]} The name was later changed from the all-capitals acronym GRAMPS to Gramps.^[11]

The project has been developed by a volunteer contributor community.^[3] LWN.net described Gramps in 2014 as a mature free software genealogy application with a plugin system, report generation, and support for multiple genealogy data formats.^[10] The software has also been discussed as an example of commons-based peer production by genealogists and for genealogists.^[12]

Gramps provides tools for recording people, families, events, places, sources, citations, repositories, media, and notes. It supports multiple naming conventions and cultural contexts, including patronymic, matronymic, and multiple-surname systems.^[13] The program also includes relationship calculators and consistency checks for improbable events.^{[14] [2]}

Reports can be generated in formats including OpenDocument Text, PDF, RTF, HTML, LaTeX, and plain text. Gramps can also create charts and relationship graphs for large family trees.^[15] Its plugin system supports additional views, tools, reports, importers, exporters, and Gramplets, which are dynamic widgets shown inside the main interface.^[16]

The software uses an event-centric documentation model similar to approaches used in cultural heritage documentation.^[17] It is multilingual and includes special-use translations for animal pedigrees and same-gender relationship reporting.^{[8] [18] [19]}

The core archival file format of Gramps is named Gramps XML and uses the file extension .gramps. It is based on XML, and its files are usually compressed with gzip.^[22] The Portable Gramps XML Package format uses the extension .gpkg and stores Gramps XML together with referenced media. Internally, Gramps uses SQLite as the default database backend, with other database backends available as plugins.^[23]

Gramps can import Gramps XML, Portable Gramps XML Package files, older Gramps database files, GEDCOM, and CSV.^[24] It can export Gramps XML, Portable Gramps XML Package files, GEDCOM, GeneWeb's GW format, Web Family Tree format, vCard, vCalendar, and CSV.^{[25] [26]}

Gramps is translated by volunteers and tracks its translations through Weblate.^{[8] [32]} In addition to ordinary interface translations, the project has supported special-use translation sets for animal pedigrees and same-gender relationship reports.^{[18] [19]}

The following table shows selected major feature releases. Patch and bug-fix releases are published through the project's release channels.^{[33] [11]}

• Comparison of genealogy software
• Comparison of web-based genealogy software
• GEDCOM

• Official website
• gramps on GitHub