Genealogy

A long time ago I started putting together a genealogy tree and, to be honest, I didn´t get very far. My wife compiled hers going back several more generations down to the late 18th century, including several photos of people who were born in the 19th century. My side is still work in progress and wihtout going that far back, it has already been a great excuse to talk about old photos and family lore. Of course one of the questions is where to stop such a tree. Should people who have a common great-granparent be listed? Or a great-great-grandparent? Why not? The chart below has close to 350 people and if all the people who share an ancestor would be added, I could imagine a couple more hundred would make it to the tree.

If you have tried this yourself, you are probably aware that a single spreadsheet will not cut it. Things begin to get out of hand rather quickly as the number of people and information grows. So pretty much from the get-go the question was which tool should I be using. I didn´t feel like using a commercial cloud-based service, and I quickly found Gramps, an open source gem (yet another one). On top if it, it is done with python which for me is always a plus, as I can peek in the inside. Feeling adventurous, I decided not to install the Windows version and instead install the linux version on the Ubuntu partition of WSL2 and I have to say, it works like a charm (thanks also to Moba Xterm!)

There are many ways to visualize the tree and, poking a bit, I found one which clearly delineates the families while putting my children in the center of the graph. I saved the relations graph as a gv file and then use that file to generate a png using the neato layout.