Places in Gramps

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Revision as of 07:23, 9 September 2007 by Annej (talk | contribs) (''Place Name'' field: Initial content)
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What is a Place?

A Place in GRAMPS generally refers to where an event occurred. This is different to an Address (see for example Why_residence_event_and_not_Address?). The Places View lists all the places in your GRAMPS database, and is a handy spot to make sure your places are named consistently.

Editing Places

GRAMPS provides a window in which you can edit a place:

Example Edit Place dialogue


Use the Place_completion_tool to help automate the management of your places, as this allows you to edit several places in one go. It is also an easy way to determine and include latitude and longitude of cities and towns.

Organising your places

There are several ways you could organise your places. The concept of a place in genealogy is very complex, due both to the level of detail you wish to capture, and the changes over time to the name of a place. Ultimately how much of this complexity you record in your database is up to you, but you will probably find it advantageous to consider your options before you have too many places in your data.

The summary below indicates some of the ways current GRAMPS users organise their places.

Level of detail

Coming very soon...

Changes over time

Coming very soon...

Place Name field

The first field in the Edit Place window is generally displayed where space is limited, such as in some graphical reports. Therefore some people like to put in here a short descriptive name.

Other people prefer this field to be a repeat of all the fields in the location tab in the bottom of the window. It can be listed either from the most specific, or the least.

For example, for a location of Street: St Luke's Church, City: Adelaide, State: South Australia, Country: Australia, Postal Code: 5000, different people would set the Place Name field to one of:

  • St Luke's
  • St Luke's Church, Adelaide
  • St Luke's Church, Adelaide, South Australia, 5000, Australia
  • Australia, 5000, South Australia, Adelaide, St Luke's Church

There are, of course, also minor variations on those listed above.

The Future

The developers have indicated that they believe the handling of places in GRAMPS could be improved, but as the current system is adequate and there many higher priority tasks, a reworking of the places in GRAMPS is not likely to happen for some time.