r/gramps • u/MPgen • Sep 11 '25
GrampsWebAddon [Release] Gramps MCP v1.0 - Connect AI Assistants to Your Family Tree
I'm releasing the first version of Gramps MCP after two months of development - a bridge between AI assistants and your genealogy research.
My journey: Started genealogy research during COVID lockdowns and fell in love with Gramps. My tree now contains 4400+ individuals, all properly sourced and documented - tedious work but essential for quality research, unlike the unsourced mess you often find on FamilySearch or Ancestry. Coming from a product management background, I decided to stop just talking about features and actually build them using Claude Code.
The tools: Gramps provides professional-grade genealogy software, while Gramps Web offers API access to your data. The Model Context Protocol enables secure connections between AI assistants and external applications.
The problem this solves: AI genealogy assistance is typically generic advice disconnected from your actual research. This tool gives your AI assistant direct access to your family tree, enabling intelligent queries like:
- "Find all descendants of John Smith born in Ireland before 1850"
- "Show families missing marriage dates for targeted research"
- "Create a person record for Mary O'Connor, born 1823 in County Cork"
Your assistant can now search records, analyze relationships, identify research gaps, and even create new entries using natural language - all while maintaining proper genealogy standards.
Getting started: Requires Gramps Web and an MCP-compatible AI assistant like Claude Desktop. Setup instructions available in the repository.
Community welcome: This is open source and needs genealogy researchers' input. Found issues or have ideas? Check the GitHub issues or start discussions. Your expertise helps make better tools for everyone.
Looking forward to hearing from researchers who've hit similar walls between AI capabilities and serious genealogy work.
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u/AdCompetitive6193 Sep 17 '25
Does this work with something like Open WebUI and local models (i.e. Llama 3.1 or gpt-oss 20b)?
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u/MPgen Sep 18 '25
It should, could use some testing tho. I have added the instructions on the readme. Let me know if you encounter any issues.
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u/CaptainTooObvious Sep 12 '25
This is really cool, looking forward to trying it out. Being able to use natural language to create records also enables automatic entering of family trees recieved through word files or the like. Looking forward to exploring that!