Gramps

I migrated to Gramps last year, and while I’m happy to be in the world of open source, it’s been a bit of a process cleaning up my data and getting it to align with the Gramps data model in general.

The Advantage Archives of small-town newspapers have been a boon to my research. In particular, the Iowa towns where my ancestors dwelled had very active social pages where they’d have one- or two-sentence updates on what different people are doing, who’s entertaining whom, etc., such as:

Recently I’ve started to become concerned about my genealogy software. I’ve used the same software for over 20 years and I really like it. But it’s made by a small, family-run company, and it really hasn’t evolved very much over that timeframe. I’ve become more and more concerned that at some point it will shut down when the family has retired or just decides the effort is no longer worth it. I’m not naming the software because I’m not trying to fault them, and it really has been one of my favorite apps for a couple decades. I was already thinking about this potential end-of-life issue when a similar issue arose with Nisus Writer, and that pushed me over the edge to being proactive about this.