Re: handling roles or positions

Hello Tim,

> I've now come across a need for a system that can track and manage
> historical information, of which descendancy is an important part, but
> there are other aspects that are equally important, and I've not found a
> good way to do this in gramps. Am I missing something or are there better
> tools to handle this?
I don't think that you're missing something, and I don't know any better 
tools either, but your questions reminds me of a Dutch genealogy program 
module called Haza-Goed. More on that later.
> As an example, let's consider the kings and queens of England. It would be
> relatively straightforward to create a family tree (or trees!) to describe
> the descendancy aspect, but what about the role or position of monarch. And
> the role of heir to the throne (prince of wales in England, Dauphin in
> France). You would want to be able to create these roles and assign them to
> the relevant people for the relevant periods and be able to view the
> timeline of the roles as first class citizens, not just buried somewhere
> deeply (e.g. an event then the person became king/queen).
> Other examples where this would be useful is for presidents, popes, prime
> ministers, and many, many others.

If you describe it like this, it means that you have people that occupy 
a position, like King of England, or POTUS, Prime Minister of The 
Netherlands, vicar of Dibley, etc. etc., and position sounds like 
location, which is a shared object in Gramps. The POTUS is the prime 
occupant of the White House, King Charles III is the prime occupant of 
Buckingham Palace, and a few more locations, and a natural extension of 
the idea would be that positions like these are also turned into shared 
objects, so that you can create a timeline for the occupants of the 
position of POTUS or King of England, etc. And for both, you can also 
add secretaries, and princes, earls, etc. to a hierarchy.

When I visit the Amsterdam archive site on the web, I can already see 
who lived at my address before I lived there, so I think that the 
analogy itself is the right one. I see no easy way to work this way in 
the current version of Gramps, other than really creating locations 
named after these types of positions.

I have an old tree in PAF, for Charlemagne and other famous persons, 
going back to the time before the book of Genesis, where the author 
added virtual parents named POTUS, or Farao of Egypt, but I don't really 
like that trick, because it messes up too many things.

Regards,

Enno




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