GRAMPS Genealogy Software Reviews

(based on 2 reviews)

29 of 65 people found this review helpful

One thing I forgot to mention in my earlier review is that there is another serious drawback for those who have very large databases (i.e., have a large number of individuals that stretch back many generations) is that there is a maximum limit of 50 generations back in which the software will calculate familial relationships. This may not be an issue for those who are just starting out as you might not see a time when your work will take you back 75 or more generations, as mine has. You start out with a dearth of information, but if you stick with it and are lucky enough to link up to royalty, which is fairly well documented (and they are all pretty much related because they wanted their children to marry for strategic and/or political purposes), then you wind up with a plethora of information that cascades into having a database that could easily include over 200,000 names and goes back into the BCE period. Genealogy can become addictive, so if you do managed to make these well-documented connections, then you could find yourself not knowing exactly how you are related to these earliest of relatives unless you work your back from yourself and count back generations, which should not be necessary when using software. Of course, many of these relative are related in well over 100's of ways, so the problem with some other software, such as PAF, is that it only calculates the first 100 relationships it finds (not to be confused with going back 100 generations)--and does not put them in order of closeness (i.e., you have to scroll through up to 100 relationships to find the closest one, and then you are not sure that is in fact the closest one because the programs stops after the first 100 it finds).

Now, all this may seem pointless, but if genealogy does become an addiction for you, and it will if you are the type who never wants to leave a project unfinished (genealogy is never unfinished), then not knowing the precise relationship will drive you nuts. One other thing is that some programs calculate the percentage of blood relation too, but I did not see that GRAMPS does that in my perusal of the manual. So, if you do make links to royalty and end up having a database this large, it may be a problem switching to another software program since the methods used to store the information are totally different and not compatible with other programs--just as they tell you up front that if you import a large database you WILL have data loss! So, my advice is to pass on this software program until the developers decide that standards were developed for a reason and they should honor the GEDCOM standard for inputting and outputting data, perhaps supplementing that with their own standard for the internal operation of their software package and/or for the outputting of data to a PDF or HTML file.

In summary, I would not recommend GRAMPS Genealogy Software to a friend.