My father has become slightly obsessed with tracking his family tree. He’s done lots of research going back around six generations. He uses a Windows application (called “Generations”, I think, but I’m not sure now), which is very awkward, though he manages.

When his grandson Liam arrived, he wanted to put Liam’s family tree in his system too. Germans tend to have quite good family records, backed up by Church archives, so we had some data.

I exported the result as a GEDCOM file and was really pleased at how well the open source GRAMPS application imported this file on Ubuntu Linux. For some reason I didn’t have high expectations, but this application is obviously well maintained.

And Gramps seems to be a better application anyway. It has a more sensible UI even though it is as feature-packed as these applications needs to be. Gramps also creates more compact ancestor graphs, so you don’t need to tape so many pages together. But it could still theoretically squeeze more on to the page at a readable size. This might already be possible but it’s hard to achieve with the awkward printing options.