So in my quest to find non-windows based versions of all of our computer programs, I got stuck on PAF.  For those of you who don’t do much genealogy, PAF is an old (reallllly old) program for tracking genealogical records.  Most mormons are familiar with PAF and really don’t use much else (although the newest online collaborative genealogy church website seems to trump all of these efforts).

Recently I ran across GRAMPS.  It combines two of my favorite things: python and free.  I imported my entire PAF file in a matter of seconds (it reads in GEDCOM files)  Surprisingly, the interface is easy to use and much cleaner and simplier than PAF.

I’m still working on what works best for me in genealogy.  I appreciate the online genealogy step up.  That seems to be better for catching duplicates and splicing trees together.  I’ve been working seperately on a different form of genealogy that focuses more on personal stories than family links.  I’m not sure where PAF/GRAMPS will fit into this framework in the future but I’m willing to bet improvements/changes to an open source project will happen before PAF.