The Gramps extension

The betty.extension.Gramps extension loads entities from Gramps family trees into your Betty ancestry.

Enable this extension in your project’s configuration file as follows:

extensions:
  betty.extension.Gramps: {}
{
  "extensions": {
    "betty.extension.Gramps": {}
  }
}

Configuration

This extension is configurable:

extensions:
  betty.extension.Gramps:
    configuration:
      family_trees:
        - file: ./gramps.gpkg
{
  "extensions": {
    "betty.extension.Gramps": {
      "configuration" : {
        "family_trees": [
          {
            "file": "./gramps.gpkg"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

All configuration options

  • family_trees (required): An array defining zero or more Gramps family trees to load. Each item is an object with the following keys:

    • file (required): the path to a Gramps XML or Gramps XML Package file.

    If multiple family trees contain entities of the same type and with the same ID (e.g. a person with ID I1234) each entity will overwrite any previously loaded entity.

Attributes

Gramps allows arbitrary attributes to be added to some of its data types. Betty can parse these to load additional information. Each of Betty’s Gramps attributes follows the same structure: betty:... (to load the attribute for any Betty project) or betty-MyProject:.. (to load an attribute for the Betty project with machine name MyProject), where ... is the name that identifies the attribute’s meaning. For the ‘privacy` attribute, the Gramps attribute’s full name would be betty:privacy or betty-MyProject:privacy.

Privacy

Gramps has limited built-in support for people’s privacy. To fully control privacy for people, as well as events, files, sources, and citations, add a betty:privacy attribute to any of these types, with a value of private to explicitly declare the data always private or public to declare the data always public. Any other value will leave the privacy undecided, as well as person records marked public using Gramps’ built-in privacy selector. In such cases, the betty.extension.Privatizer extension may decide if the data is public or private.

Dates

For unknown date parts, set those to all zeroes and Betty will ignore them. For instance, 0000-12-31 will be parsed as “December 31”, and 1970-01-00 as “January, 1970”.

Event types

Betty supports the following Gramps event types:

  • Adopted

  • Birth

  • Burial

  • Baptism

  • Conference

  • Confirmation

  • Correspondence

  • Cremation

  • Emigration

  • Engagement

  • Death

  • Divorce

  • Divorce Filing (imported as DivorceAnnouncement)

  • Funeral

  • Immigration

  • Marriage

  • Marriage Banns (imported as MarriageAnnouncement)

  • Missing

  • Occupation

  • Residence

  • Will

  • Retirement

Event roles

Betty supports the following Gramps event roles:

  • Attendee

  • Beneficiary

  • Celebrant

  • Family (imported as Subject)

  • Organizer

  • Primary (imported as Subject)

  • Speaker

  • Unknown (imported as Attendee)

  • Witness

Order & priority

The order of lists of data, or the priority of individual bits of data, can be automatically determined by Betty in multiple different ways, such as by matching dates, or locales. When not enough details are available, or in case of ambiguity, the original order is preserved. If only a single item must be retrieved from the list, this will be the first item, optionally after sorting.

For example, if a place has multiple names (which may be historical or translations), Betty may try to filter names by the given locale and date, and then indiscriminately pick the first one of the remaining names to display as the canonical name.

Tips:

  • If you want one item to have priority over another, it should come before the other in a list (e.g. be higher up).

  • Items with more specific or complete data, such as locales or dates, should come before items with less specific or complete data. However, items without dates at all are considered current and not historical.

  • Unofficial names or nicknames, should generally be put at the end of lists.