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I have imported a large amount of people as a .ged file, but the date-formating are in the wrong order. They are as "day-month-year" (ex. 23 apr 1850), but Gramps date options seems to only be able to recognize dates in a "year-month-day" format. Is there any way to fix all of them without changing them one by one?

Ludwiggle
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  • Have you looked at https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Date_Handler – PolyGeo Jul 17 '22 at 21:52
  • What you are doing should work. My primary tree is on Ancestry.com. To create reports (in GRAMPS), I occasionally export a GEDCOM file (.GED), it saves the dates as day-month-year. I then import it into GRAMPS without any issues. However, I did notice that the month must be 3 letters, I had a few entries where the month was spelled out, these created issues. – Mattman944 Jul 20 '22 at 17:11

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This problem sounds like a programmable 'Formatting' error, and relates to the software package you are using. For instance, many packages give you the option in their 'Preferences' section. For instance, "which Language" you wish to use, or other features. Look for "Date" formatting, which should offer various preferences for usage.

By the way, "Wrong" is a relative term. I use the day-month-year format as well...as well as most the rest of the world.

Marvin
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  • Most of the world uses Year-Month-Day, Which is also the ISO standard. Day-Month-Year is a European thing. – Chenmunka Jul 20 '22 at 09:03
  • If we're talking about a date including the year, month and day, then the ISO Standard is yyyy-mm-dd, with all the items being numeric. I'd suggest that any discussion of date formats needs to specify whether the month (in particular) is alphabetic (usually written as mmm in my experience) or numeric, otherwise it all becomes a bit unclear. Equally, we would need to distinguish formal from informal usage. British IT systems tend to use yyyy-mm-dd but everyday speech uses dd mmm (ie alpha) yyyy. At least, it does today. Some years ago, the typical format was mmm dd yyyy. – AdrianB38 Jul 20 '22 at 17:24
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Gramps is a USA-by-default program. And the standard hyphenated numeric date format there is m-d-yy (or "m-d-yyyy" or "mm-dd-yyyy")

Since the rest of the world tends to use other ordering but a large portion of imported data is from USA websites, the hyphenated numeric date format is considered to be "ambiguous" unless it starts with the fully-qualified (includes Century) year. So hyphenated dates will be stored as an unvalidated text string during data entry or import unless in yyyy-m-d format.

You can run selections of Events with "hyphenated date" text strings through a special purpose date parser to convert them to a date value. That way you take responsibility if you corrupt the date by selecting the wrong parsing scheme... Gramps won't have done that by itself.

There is a discussion in the Gramps "Discourse" support forum about using a script for the SuperTool addon to re-parse dates en masse following a specific date format. See: https://gramps.discourse.group/t/making-date-input-more-flexible/2814/9

Brian McCullough
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