Blurring the line between Genealogy and Software Configuration Management visualisation.

Gramps2Gource combines Gramps (a Genealogy program written in Python) and Gource (a software version control visualisation tool for showing changes over time) to help produce a novel family history visualisation. It parses exported .gramps files to produce a Gource custom log file containing the pedigree for a specified person. This custom log file can then be passed to Gource for rendering. See the example video below:

The Gource custom log format contains the following pipe ('|') delimited fields:

timestamp - A unix timestamp of when the update occured.
username  - The name of the user who made the update.
type      - initial for the update type - (A)dded, (M)odified or (D)eleted.
file      - Path of the file updated.
colour    - A colour for the file in hex (FFFFFF) format. Optional.

Gramps2Gource works on Python2.7 and Python3.3.

One day I may investigate integrating this into Gramps as a plugin where it could access the Gramps database directly instead of via an exported .gramps file.

As always, garbage in garbage out. If your database is not well managed and consistent then your milage may vary.

This is really just a proof of concept. There is lots of cleanup that could be done and lots that could be added but it does what I wanted.

Gource can be installed using:

$ sudo apt-get install gource

NOTE: Gource versions prior to v0.38 could not handle negative times (times before 1970). This was a real show stopper for displaying family history which is all based in the past. However, since version 0.38 this issue was resolved. In recent versions of Ubuntu the Gource version is v0.40 so this should not be a problem.

Gramps2Gource uses dateutil to help parse complex date descriptions.

$ [sudo] pip[3] install python-dateutil

For Python2 and Python3 compatibility Gramps2Gource uses the future module, hence this must be installed also.

$ [sudo] pip[3] install future

1. Open your Gramps family history database
2. From the menu choose `Family Trees` then `Export...`
3. In the dialog that opens click `Forward`.
4. Select `Gramps XML (family tree)` then click forward.
5. Click forward again as the defaults are OK.
6. Choose a filename then click `Forward`.
7. Click Apply.

git clone https://github.com/claws/gramps2gource.git
cd gramps2gource

To generate the custom gource log and display it you need to tell the gramps2gource.py script the focus person and the path to the Gramps database file. An output file containing the gource custom log will be saved to a file called pedigree_<name>.log.

Example:

$ python gramps2gource.py --name="Amber Marie Smith" --db=example.gramps
$ cat pedigree_amber_marie_smith.log | gource --load-config gource.conf -

The gource.conf effectively builds a command line similar to:

$ cat pedigree_amber_marie_smith.log | gource -1280x720 --log-format custom --font-size 20 --hide users,dirnames,date --stop-at-end --camera-mode overview --seconds-per-day 1 --disable-bloom --auto-skip-seconds 1 -i 0 -c 3.0 -

The '-' at the end is important, it instructs Gource to read from standard input.

Event dates can often be stored in different calendar formats. To accomodate this it is possible to implement your own date parser to convert your specific calendar date strings into the necessary datetime object used by Gramps2Gource.

Instead of running gramps2gource.py you will need to use something like the custom_date_g2g.py example. This script accepts the same command line arguments as the gramps2gource.py script.

Prior to running the script you will need to make some code changes to implement and register your specific date handler functions.

For example, if you have event dates in French Republican format (e.g. the cformat field stored within the gramps date item is French Republican) you would create and register a handler with the name French Republican. For example:

def frech_republican_date_handler(datestring):
    return magic_datetime_creater(datestring)

gramps.date_processor.register(
    'French Republican', french_republican_date_handler)

You need to register the date parser prior to instantiating the Gramps2Gource object.

Multiple name arguments can be specified if you want to show more than one focus person. When multiple names are supplied the output file defaults to pedigree.log.

Example:

$ python gramps2gource.py --name="Amber Marie Smith" --name="John Hjalmar Smith" --db=example.gramps
$ cat pedigree.log | gource --load-config gource.conf --hide-root -

To record the visualisation to a video file, the following commands may be useful.

h264:

$ cat ~/path/to/custom_output.log | gource --load-config gource.conf -output-ppm-stream - --output-framerate 30 - | avconv -y -r 30 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -b 8192K /path/to/video/output/file.mp4

webm:

$ cat ~/path/to/custom_output.log | gource --load-config gource.conf -output-ppm-stream - | avconv -y -r 30 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libvpx -b 10000K /path/to/video/output/file.webm