GRAMPS is a Free Software Project for Genealogy, offering a professional genealogy program, and a wiki open to all. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.
I’ve been trying to collect some family names in preparation for the baby. The wife and I wouldn’t mind using a family name for the baby if we can find one we like, so we’re trying to find one we like. A cousin of my grandmother gave her a copy of the Wolman family tree (My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is Wolman). And I spent most of yesterday evening entering it into GRAMPS, the above-linked genealogy program. It’s really just a graphical front end for some sort of custom database, it seems, but it’s a pretty cool product for creating a family tree. There are websites that let you do it, but they seem to want money. But since this program was developed for Linux (and is included in the Ubuntu packages, for those using Ubuntu), it’s free. I think the final count when I finished last night was 388 people in the tree. Some of them are unnamed, and there were a few guesses where the writing got cut off when it was photocopied. But it’s a pretty extensive picture of that part of the family. My next goal is to get something similar on my dad’s side, and then work on the wife’s family. And I’d like to get the important dates in – almost no one in the tree has a birth or a death date, and many of non-Wolmans don’t have last names. This is especially common for women who married in and stopped using their maiden names, and I imagine many genealogists have this problem. But it’s kind of fun to find out all this stuff. Even if we don’t find a name for the kid, I’d be happy with just having a big family tree to pass along.