GRAMPS is a free, open-source, genealogy software program, somewhat like Personal Ancestral File 5.2, Family Tree Maker, or Reunion (for Macintosh). I run it on a Linux operating system, but it is also available for Windows.
Unlike most free or for-a-fee genealogy programs, the software source code for GRAMPS is openly published and you are free to modify it at will. So, if you have the skills, and don't like how the program does something, you can get right down into the code and change it to suit yourself. This is a fabulous advantage. Only, I'm not that smart.
I can diddle code just enough to get myself into serious trouble. So the open-source nature of GRAMPS was not the only reason I was attracted to GRAMPS -- although it did turn out to be very important to our uses.
GRAMPS has one capability I just could not do without -- its ability to build a really nice website from my extensive genealogy database. Many genealogy software programs purport to generate websites; clunky junk, mostly, greatly inferior to their parent software package. But not GRAMPS! The designers of GRAMPS have coded a website functionality like none I have seen before. It was love at first sight. The genealogy web pages on this website (www.thefretwells.com) were coded by GRAMPS. So if you like how our genealogy webpages look, and how they hyperlink to each other, you now know how we did it.
We were able to select from several cascading style sheets (.css files) to get the look and feel I liked most for the web pages. But more importantly, we could control the content of the website. We had access to the Python file (NarrativeWeb.py) that builds the web pages, so we could omit or add selected pieces of information.
Another great thing about GRAMPS is its strong database management capability. I found errors in my database with GRAMPS that the other genealogy programs simply do not locate.
So, if you are interested, take a look at the GRAMPS website.
We spent years discussing how to best present our genealogical data. When we found GRAMPS we found our answer. To the designers of GRAMPS we express our heartfelt thanks for a tremendous product.