Gramps Evidence

Create a Source (a body of evidence: a record set, book, certificate, website). In the Gramps evidence model a Source is what you cite *through* a Citation. Create the source once, then create citations against it for each fact it supports. Optionally link it to a Repository (where the source is held).

Add a web URL to a person, place, or repository. Only these three object types carry a URL list. For sources/citations, record a web address as an attribute (add_attribute) instead.

Ask the server whether a person is probably still alive, and why. The server walks relatives to decide, so it handles people with no dates of their own — someone undated whose children died a century ago. Use it before publishing or sharing anything, and use `explain` when you want to see the reasoning rather than just the verdict. Note this is advisory. Bulk output is filtered by this server's own rule regardless of what this returns.

Attach an image or document to an object -- a new upload, or one already in the tree. With file_path, the bytes are uploaded into the tree's managed media directory (so don't point at files you don't want copied); if that exact file is already present it is reused rather than duplicated. With media_ref, an existing Media object is linked. One image should be ONE Media object, linked from each object it belongs to and cited once per fact it proves. Uploading the same photograph separately for the husband and the wife creates duplicates that have to be unpicked later. The write is verified aft…

Audit the links between people and families, in both directions. Finds a family a person lists twice, a child a family lists twice, a link one side holds and the other lacks, and links to objects that do not exist. Each finding says how to repair it. Reports only.

Cite the parent-child link itself, on the family's ChildRef. "This child belongs to these parents" is a DIFFERENT claim from "this child appears in this record", and it needs its own citation object. Reusing the child's existing citation handle makes the link inherit a confidence that was assigned to another claim entirely, so the link displays a confidence its evidence never earned. Note what a ChildRef citation asserts: BOTH sides of the link. A census naming only the mother does not document the father. Where only one parent is evidenced, cite that parent's relationship instead of implyin…

Attach a citation to an event that ALREADY exists. Use this to source an event you didn't create with an inline citation -- e.g. one added through the Gramps web UI, or an unsourced event surfaced by list_unsourced_facts. The citation is resolved/created (existing handle/id, or an inline source_title + page + confidence) and appended to the event's citation list (no duplicates). Does not change any other event field.

Attach a citation to any object that carries one -- not just events. cite_event covers facts; this covers the rest. The important case is the FAMILY, whose citation supports a claim no event makes: that these two people were a couple. Person-level citations are for evidence about the individual as a whole (an identity document) rather than about one dated fact -- prefer citing the specific event where one exists. A NAME is cited with object_type='name': "this record gives this spelling" is narrower than evidence about the person. To cite a parent-child link, use cite_child_link: that is a di…

Merge several people or families into one chronological timeline. The way to see a household move together through censuses, or to check whether a family's events are mutually consistent. Carries the same citation count and confidence per event as get_timeline, with an uncited_count across the whole set.

Consult the legacy GEDCOM reference layer for HINTS (never authoritative). Searches the configured Ancestry/FamilySearch exports and returns, per file, matching individuals and their claimed facts. Crucially, each fact is flagged whether the legacy tree attached a source, with the source text if present -- so you can distinguish 'they cite an actual death certificate' from 'unsourced guess'. These are UNTRUSTED hints: use them to decide what real record to hunt for, then create the fact in the tree citing that record -- do not copy a hint in as a sourced fact. Probably-living people are withh…

Save a reusable custom filter built from Gramps' own rules. Worth doing for a selection you will run repeatedly — an audit scope, a branch of the tree — because the filter then has a name rather than being retyped each time.

Counts of people, families, events, citations, sources, repositories, places, media, and notes in the tree. A quick health/overview check.

Delete a saved custom filter. Deletes the filter definition only. Nothing in the tree is touched.

Permanently delete an object from the tree by handle or gramps_id. DESTRUCTIVE. The server also removes every reference to it. Refused when it is the only holder of a note or image (pass carry_to to move them), and for a source with citations, which the server would delete with it.

Remove a reference from an object: an event from a person, an image from a source, a tag, a note, a child from a family. The reference is removed; the object itself survives unless delete_if_orphan is set AND nothing else points at it -- which is checked, because deleting something other facts still reference leaves dangling handles behind.

Measure the elapsed time between two events. The arithmetic behind most plausibility checks: age at marriage, years between a census and a death, how long a widow waited. Doing this by hand from two formatted date strings is where transcription errors hide.

Write a full-tree export to disk. Take one before any bulk write. Cheap insurance: a few seconds and one file. A bulk write that goes wrong cannot always be undone transaction by transaction; a dump can be re-imported.

Find likely-duplicate objects. Reports only -- it never merges anything. Duplicates are not merely untidy: a duplicate SOURCE makes a single-sourced fact look corroborated, which is a false evidentiary claim. But the reverse error is just as real -- an index entry and the register page it indexes are TWO documents and must stay separate. This tool finds candidates; deciding which are truly the same document is yours. Merge with merge_objects.

Walk a person's ancestors up to N generations (a nested parents tree). Living/private ancestors appear as redacted stubs unless include_private is set.

List everything that references this object, grouped by type. The right way to ask "is this source actually cited?", "which facts rest on this citation?", or "is it safe to delete this?" -- an object with zero backlinks is orphaned; one with backlinks will leave dangling references if deleted.

Read one citation: page, confidence, date, and its source. `cited_by_count` is the useful part. Zero means nothing references this citation — it is orphan debris, and `uncite` should have deleted it.

Walk a person's descendants up to N generations (a nested children tree). Living/private descendants appear as redacted stubs unless include_private is set.

List the DNA matches recorded against a person. Each match reports total shared centiMorgans and the largest single segment — the two figures a relationship estimate actually rests on — plus any common ancestor already identified. **DNA evidence works differently from documentary evidence.** A match proves a biological relationship exists; it does not say which one. Shared cM constrains the possibilities and rarely resolves them, and it says nothing about the paper trail. `unattributed_count` is the useful number: matches with no common ancestor identified are the open research.

Get an event: type, date, place handle, description, citation count, and attributes. Use to inspect an event before citing or editing it.

Read the tree's record-holders: oldest at death, youngest parent, most children. Superlatives across a set of people, not statistics about one person. An implausible holder — a father at eight, a death at 130 — is usually a data error, which makes this a quick plausibility check. Living and private people are excluded unless include_private is set. Slow: the server computes it all per call.

Get a family: relationship type, parent handles, child handles, event count.

Check whether a background job has finished, and whether it worked. Undo, verification, import and reindex are dispatched to a worker and answer before the work is done. Poll this until `finished` is true, then read `succeeded`. Submitting one of those operations and never checking leaves you assuming an outcome you have not seen.

Read one media object: path, mime type, checksum, description, date. `referenced_by_count` above one is usually correct — one image cited from every fact it proves. Several media objects sharing a checksum is the duplicate that `find_duplicates(kind='media_checksum')` hunts.

Read one note in full, with its type and what it is attached to. Notes hold the researcher's own reasoning — why a conflict was resolved one way, what a hard-to-read page actually said — so the text comes back whole rather than truncated.

Read any object's raw record -- including places, media, notes and citations, which have no shaped getter. Returns the record as stored, which is what you want before editing one. For people and sources the shaped getters (get_person, get_source) are easier to read.

Get full detail for one person: name, gender, events (with citation counts), attributes, family links, and media count. Direct lookup is allowed even for living/private individuals (this is your own local tool); only bulk/list tools filter them. Use this to inspect someone before adding facts, or to check whether an event is already cited.

Read one place: name, title, type, enclosure, coordinates and URLs. The `enclosed_by` handles are the jurisdictional chain. A place with none is orphaned in the hierarchy, which is usually a place that got minted from an event's place string rather than created deliberately.

Who added, edited or deleted one record, and when, newest first. Each change names its transaction: get_transaction shows what it changed. Before gramps-webapi 3.22 the whole transaction log is read instead: slower, and the result says so.

Work out how two people in the tree are related. Returns the relationship in words plus the generation distance from each person to their common ancestor. `related` is false when no common ancestor was found within the search depth — which is a finding in itself if you expected one.

Read one report's default options before running it. Reports take a full option dict, not a partial one, so the way to change a single setting is to read these defaults and override that key.

Get a repository: name, type, URLs, address count, and (if available) the number of sources it holds.

Read the researcher details recorded for this tree. These are embedded in every export, so they travel with any GEDCOM or Gramps XML you hand to someone else. Worth checking before sharing one.

Get a source: title, author, publication info, abbreviation, linked repositories, media/note counts, attributes, and citation count. Use to inspect a source before citing through it or editing it.

Build a chronological timeline of someone's life events. Each entry carries their age at the time, how many citations support the event, and the strongest confidence among them — so a timeline doubles as a readable audit of where the evidence thins out. `uncited_count` says how many events on it rest on nothing.

Read one transaction in full, including the objects it changed. list_transactions summarises; this shows what actually moved. Read it before undoing anything.

Report a person's Y-DNA haplogroup, from broadest clade to terminal. Y-DNA follows the direct paternal line only, so it speaks to one thread of a tree and is silent on every other. A shared terminal clade indicates a common paternal ancestor, usually far further back than any record reaches — it corroborates a surname line rather than proving a named link. `has_data` is false when the person has no Y-DNA recorded, which is the normal case.

Link many sources to their repositories in one call -- a sweep. Each row is link_repository: its own write and transaction, so a failed row does not stop the rest. Each row reports linked, already_linked, missing or error.

Link an existing source to an existing repository that holds it. Adds a repository reference (with an optional call number) to the source. Both objects must already exist. Duplicate links to the same repository are skipped.

List the custom filters already saved on this instance. A saved filter can be reused by name from `query_objects` and the timelines, so a complicated selection is defined once.

List the event type names this tree uses, with their stored integers. Useful before a `query_records` filter, and as a check on itself: an unexpected type name in the list is usually a typo that Gramps silently accepted as a new custom type.

List the filter rules Gramps offers in a namespace. This is the vocabulary that `query_records` and GrampsQL cannot reach: "is a descendant of", "has a common ancestor with", "matches another filter". Read it before building a custom filter with create_filter.

List recent background jobs for this tree, newest first: undo, verify, reindex, report. Use when you have lost a task_id, or to see whether anything is still running before starting a write session. Research tasks are list_research_tasks.

The tree's type vocabularies: Gramps' standard names and its own custom ones. The write tools take any of these, in any case. A name in neither is refused unless allow_new_type asks for a NEW custom type, which then stays in the tree's vocabulary for good.

List the reports this Gramps instance can generate. Gramps ships a full report engine — Ahnentafel, descendant reports, family group sheets, kinship, fan and relationship charts, statistics, and an end-of-line report that lists exactly where research stops. Each entry names the option keys it accepts; read the defaults with get_report_options before overriding any.

List the research tasks in Gramps Web's Tasks view: title, status, priority, tags, attributes and description. Ordered as the view orders them: Open, In Progress, Blocked, Done. Not background jobs (list_jobs). A private task is a redacted stub.

List all tags in the tree with their handle, name, and color. Use to see what labels already exist before tagging (tag_object matches by exact name).

Recent writes to the tree: what changed, when, by which user. Each entry's transaction_id is what undo_transaction takes. Useful for "what did that bulk pass actually do?" and for finding the transaction to reverse when it did the wrong thing.

Audit: list events that lack a citation or are tagged UNSOURCED. This is the core quality query for a fully-cited tree -- run it to find facts that still need a source. Returns each offending event with its person, type, date, and the reason ('no-citation' or 'tagged-unsourced').

Merge two objects that are the same thing. Dry-run by default. This uses Gramps' own server-side merge: every reference to `drop` is re-pointed at `keep` and the subordinate lists are unioned, in one transaction. Do NOT do this by hand: a manual merge that misses one of the lists the dropped object carries loses what was on it. Before merging, be sure they really are one thing. Two records OF the same event are two documents: an index entry and the register page it indexes stay separate, and merging them would turn two independent citations into one, silently weakening every fact that rested…

Move a child to another family with the link's citations and notes, placed in birth order. Detaching and re-adding loses both. The new family is written first: a failure leaves the child in both, never in neither.

Read a document image with the reader that suits it; doc_type and lang choose. print: text the media or its sources already carry, else Tesseract. hand: an English hand returns the image for you to transcribe as the result instructs; German goes to Transkribus only, never a vision read; Norwegian and others to Transkribus, with the image to check. table: FamilySearch's index (get_records_on_image). volume: full-text search first. Transkribus costs credits: within the monthly budget, or with spend_credits. The transcript is never the evidence; the citation stays on the image.

Parse pasted shared-segment data into structured segments and totals. Use this to check what a match file actually contains before recording it. Returns each segment plus the total and largest-segment centiMorgans. If nothing parses, `parsed` is false and the reason is given. That distinction matters: the server answers unreadable input with zero segments and a success status, which would otherwise read as "this person shares no DNA" rather than "I could not read that".

Query any collection with a server-side filter. The workhorse for audits. Use this instead of fetching a collection and filtering it yourself: whole-collection pulls are slow on any real tree, and the filter runs in the database. Typical audit questions it answers directly: * uncited high-confidence claims: citations where `confidence >= 3 AND page = ""` * documents with no image: sources where `media_list.length = 0` * anonymous media: media where `desc = ""` * a URL anywhere: `urls.any.path ~ "blm.gov"`; a list is searched through its items, never with `~` on the list itself To ask "wha…

Query any collection server-side, with columns, filters and sorting. More capable than `query_objects` and the tool to reach for on an audit. It reads indexed columns, reaches arbitrary paths inside the stored object, and follows relationships — so "families where the mother died before the father" or "events whose place is in Ohio" are single queries. **It is the only way to filter events by type.** GrampsQL cannot: the word is shadowed, so `type = "Birth"` silently matches nothing. Pass `event_type` here instead. Returns rows plus a total count and a `next_after` cursor. Private records, …

Rebuild the full-text index behind Gramps Web's search box. The server updates the index in the background after each write. Rebuild it after a large import, or when search misses something the tree holds. Returns a task_id to poll with get_job.

Generate a report and return the file it produced. Living people and private records are left out (living_people 0, incl_private false) unless you pass those options or include_private; Gramps' own default includes both. Usually runs in the background, returning a task_id to poll with get_job.

Search people by name substring and optional birth-year range. Bulk output: probably-living people (born < 110 years ago with no recorded death) and records marked private are returned as redacted stubs (ids only) unless include_private is set. Fetch a specific person by id with get_person if you need their detail.

Set, replace or remove the father or mother of an existing family -- the wife a record names -- keeping both sides of every link, children and all.

Set (or clear) the Gramps private flag on an object. Private records are withheld from bulk output (queries, searches, tree walks, timelines, reports) unless a call passes include_private.

Attach a named Tag to an object, creating the Tag if it doesn't exist yet. Tags are lightweight cross-cutting labels ('Verified', 'Needs review', 'DNA-confirmed'). Matching is by exact name; an existing tag is reused.

Detach a citation from an object, deleting it if it is left orphaned. Detaching without deleting is how orphan citations accumulate: the fact the citation supported is gone, but the citation sits in the database still looking like evidence of something. Use this when a citation was attached to the wrong fact, or when a superseded bucket citation is replaced by the real record.

Undo a past transaction, after checking whether it can be undone cleanly. A conflict means an object was edited again after this transaction; undoing anyway throws that later edit away. The conflict check is free and runs first, so the default tells you what you are dealing with before anything changes.

Correct, retype or remove one alternate name, in place. Edited in place, the name keeps its citations. The primary name is update_person(name=...); a new name is add_alternate_name.

Set or remove ONE attribute on an object in place, keeping its citations, notes and privacy.

Change a child's relationship to the father or mother -- a stepson held as a birth child -- in place. The child keeps the link's citations, notes and its place in the birth order, which detaching and re-adding the child loses.

Edit a citation's locator, confidence, date, or the source it points at. A page-less citation on a long document is not a locator, and a confidence is a per-instance judgement, not a property of the source class. IMPORTANT: a citation carries ONE confidence, and it belongs to ONE claim. Every fact attached to this citation shares whatever you set here. If the same page supports a second, different claim (a census page proving both "this child appears here" and "these are her parents"), make a SECOND citation on the same source and page -- do not re-grade this one.

Re-write many citations' pages or confidences in one call -- a sweep. Each row is update_citation: its own write and transaction. A row whose live page no longer starts with expect_page_prefix is reported as drifted, not overwritten. Rows report applied, unchanged, drifted, missing or error.

Edit an existing event in place: its type, date, place or description. Only what you pass changes. The event keeps its id, citations, notes, media and every person sharing it, so correct a wrong type or an unsupported place here rather than replacing the event. Citations: cite_event.

Change a person's reference to a shared event in place: its role, or attributes such as 'As enumerated' or 'Age'.

Edit a media object's description, date, or path.

Set scalar fields on any object -- the escape hatch for places, notes, repositories and the rest. Only scalar fields are settable. Structural lists (citation_list, event_ref_list, media_list, ...) are refused on purpose: replacing one wholesale is exactly how references get silently dropped. Each has its own tool -- cite_object, detach_object, tag_object, attach_media.

Edit a person's gender, primary name, or privacy flag. Replacing the primary name preserves the old one as an 'Also Known As': a name in the tree came from some record, and dropping it loses the link to whatever document used it. To add a name without replacing the primary one, use add_alternate_name.

Edit a place's type, parent enclosure, name, title, or coordinates. This is the tool update_object_fields deliberately refuses to be: place_type and the enclosure are structural, so they get guard rails here -- the parent must already exist, setting it cannot create an enclosure cycle, and a place holding several dated enclosures (a territory-to-state succession) is refused rather than silently flattened. Aim for every place typed, every non-country place parented, and street addresses on events rather than in the place tree.

Change a research task's status, priority, privacy or attributes, or add to its description. Each attribute is replaced, never added beside the old one, so Gramps Web shows the value set. add_attribute would append a second Status that Gramps Web ignores. A private task's description note is private too; making the task public leaves a private note private unless private_note=false. Refuses a source that is not a task.

Edit an existing source's title, author, publication info, and/or abbreviation. Only the fields you provide are changed; the rest are left as-is.

Edit or remove ONE existing URL entry on a person, place, or repository. add_url can only append -- this corrects an entry already there (the classic case: a Find a Grave link filed under the wrong type). The other fields on the object are untouched.

Run Gramps' own genealogical plausibility checks over the whole tree. This is a different audit from the citation ones. `list_unsourced_facts` asks whether a claim has evidence; this asks whether a claim is possible — a mother bearing a child at nine, a marriage lasting 120 years, a date that will not parse. A wrong date can be impeccably sourced, so these catch what a citation sweep cannot. Leave the thresholds alone on a first run; the server's defaults are the conventional ones. Tighten a specific bound when chasing a specific class of error. May run in the background, in which case a ta…