Grouping Surnames
Variants of a surname complicate reports that summarize family lines. But there are features to include variants (and statistical outliers) in with the larger grouping.
Contents
How can similar surnames be grouped?
The Gramps' Group As surname override found in the Name Editor is advanced feature.
The following example configures certain names to take advantage of the capability.
Accessing the Name Editor Names are an Attribute of a Person. The advanced features are accessed from the Names tab while editing a Person.
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Leveraging the Group As feature
For those not familiar with the function, surnames like “Clark” and “Clarke” can be grouped in the Grouped People view under a single grouping. I chose to bring the names together under “Clark”. With the Display name starting with the given name, this brings together every record regardless of the spelling of the name “Clark”, The names of “John Clark” are seen together with the names “John Clarke”.
In the reports that I use most when sharing with relatives (the Narrated and Dynamic Web), navigation by Surname or Individuals utilizes this grouping and all the Clark and Clarke individuals are grouped together. But the Surname heading was just the one name used in the grouping, “Clark”.
Then I had a revelation. There is no need to use just one or the other name to group together. So instead of just setting the override for the “Clarke” records to “Clark”, I have now started to set both overrides, Clark and Clarke to “Clark (Clarke)”. McDonald and MacDonald are now grouped as “McDonald (MacDonald)”, etc.
And these settings carry over into the two web reports.
Finding all the Group As Persons
Next, I needed to find all the Group As modifications that I had already made before this Aha! moment.
I did an un-compressed XML backup to explore for what Gramps was doing with the information. All globally changed Group As entries are stored at the end of the file in a nice compact list. This makes it easy to find the records that I had already done.
See also
- Feature documentation:Group As
- based on the Gramps-users archived threads:
- The Group As name override
From: Dave Scheipers - 2019-03-20 20:33:51
- Gramps-users - Name editor and search filter: clarification needed - ...the Group As key is not at all related with any name. Suppose you want to quickly select a very tiny group of persons inhabiting a small isolated endogamic hamlet XYZZY. These people bear the unique (not seen elsewhere) names of Hamsmith, Letthompson, Hamjones and Letjones. You can give all this names the Group As key "XYZZY" and they will display together in the list. Note my example is a bit contorted because you can select them from place name XYZZY. You can tranpose my example to a more sensible "King Rex's descendants" key...
- unify similar surmanes (sic)
- threads with "Group As name"
- Guild of One Name Studies : Variants and Deviants