Gramps Event Participants

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:

Mr. and Mrs. John Heitt and their son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Heitt of Macquoketa [sic], spent last Tuesday and Wednesday at the home of the former’s sister, Mrs. E. A. Reyman. From here they went to Cherokee to visit other relatives.

There are hundreds of these items. This has been great for putting my ancestors in a social context and better understanding the connections between people. Sometimes it has introduced me to a person previously unknown to me who, upon further research, turned out to be part of the family – maybe a distant cousin or an in-law. Sometimes it’s helped uncover relationships or names that were previously unknown. I want to have a consistent way to note these items and link the associated participants.

Enter Events in Gramps. An Event can have source citations, participants, notes, etc. So in this case I can create an Event with the description “Heitts of Maquoketa visit Louisa Reyman,” properly cite the newspaper source, and link it to the different people mentioned.

The challenge in Gramps is that associating Events with multiple participants is pretty arduous. You have to copy the Event ID, find and open each person’s details, choose “Share an existing event” and then paste the Event ID. This is a lot of steps and clicking! The Gramps clipboard can help a little bit, but there are still a lot of steps involved. Did I mention I have hundreds of these items?

Here’s where Gramps being open source pays off. I worked with Claude Code to produce a Gramps Event Participants Gramplet that can quickly associate an Event with multiple participants directly from the Events view.

Now I can create an Event, and in the Event Participants tab quickly add participants with a type-ahead search field that matches any form of a person’s name. This has dramatically sped up the workflow of cataloging all these events.