Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Sourceforge periodically sends a list of the top projects. On the most recent list, phpGedView caught my eye. It creates a web site of your genealogy data so you can share it with others in your family tree. My sister maintains my side of our family tree and my wife does hers. Once I started reading, it was apparent that this software, as well as its peers, is more for viewing than editing. So I started looking into open source genealogy software. I’d like to have something that can be run on multiple platforms, or at least exchanges data with other platforms. Currently, our family trees are in Family Tree Maker 6.0. This is a Windows program. Fortunately, it exports to GEDCOM, the most popular file format for geneaology data.

The first contender is GRAMPS. It is available as an RPM that installed with no trouble on my RedHat9 box. It imported my three data files that I exported from FTW in GEDCOM format with no trouble, except for not understanding telephone numbers (the PHON field). You may be wondering why I have three files. One is the original my sister made in FTW 4, the other is the most recent copy of my sister’s data and the third is my wife’s. As you can imagine there’s a fair amount of overlap. Under the Tools/Database Processing section of the menu in GRAMPS is a duplicate person finder. I ran this and it did find the duplicates. At the bottom of the dialog box is a Merge button. I selected a duplicate, hit merge and it popped up another dialog showing the fields of both records. I picked the lower-ID’s record’s fields and hit Merge and Edit. No joy:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/usr/share/gramps/MergeData.py", line 354, in on_merge_clicked

self.update(self.p1,self.p2,old_id)

File "/usr/share/gramps/plugins/Merge.py", line 268, in on_update

self.redraw()

File "/usr/share/gramps/plugins/Merge.py", line 243, in redraw

list.append((c,p1,p2.getId()))

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'getId'