Persons

Persons are the heart of your family history. This page goes through how you create, edit, and find persons in PastPaths.

Create a person

Go to Persons in the main menu and click "+ New person" (or similar).

In the form, you fill in:

• First name (required)
• Last name
• Nickname — what the person was called in everyday life (separate several with semicolons)
• Alternate names — other names the person is known by in the sources, for example married name, farm name, or soldier name. Each name gets a row of its own with a name and a type, see Alternate names
• Gender — male, female, or leave empty if unknown
• Date of birth and place of birth
• Date of death and place of death (if the person has passed away)
• Notes — free text about the person
• Tags & categories — group and filter persons (can also be added later on the detail page)

You don't need to fill in everything

It's perfectly fine to create a person with just "Anna, 1850s, from somewhere in Värmland" and fill in the rest as you find more.

→ Read more about date precision

Alternate names

Click Add name for a new row. Type the name and choose a type in the list next to it:

• Also known as, Birth name, Maiden name, Married name, Immigrant name, Professional name, Adoptive name, Farm name, and Soldier name
• Name prefix and Name suffix — for example "Rev." or "Sr."
• Other type … — type a type of your own
• No type — when you don't know what the name is

The cross on the row removes the name. The person page and the person dialog show the type after the name, for example "Anna Berg (Married name)". The person page's information card shows nicknames and alternate names.

On GEDCOM import, the person's other name lines and names such as married names, aliases, and farm names become alternate names with a type. On export, they're written as names of their own, so other programs can read them. → GEDCOM

→ Read more about how places work

Living persons

For relatives who are alive today, you can mark the person as "living". The reports, the family tree PDF, printing an image, and the GEDCOM export can hide living persons when you share your research — by default, the name is replaced with "Private". → Share safely in the reports · → The export dialog

A person with neither a date of birth nor a date of death counts as living. Enter an approximate year or check the box for deceased, otherwise the person — and their deceased descendants — are hidden when you share.

• If you know the person is deceased but have no year or date, you can tick the box
• If the person has a death event, they're shown as deceased, even if the event has no date
• You don't need to enter an exact date, a year or year-month is enough
• You can write a biography/notes and add relationships

The person form

GDPR and living relatives

Keep in mind that details about living persons are covered by data protection rules. PastPaths makes it easy to keep the data private (everything is local), but it's still worth asking your relatives whether they're okay with their details being stored — especially if you share printouts or GEDCOM files with others.

Date precision

PastPaths understands that old dates are rarely exact. For dates of birth and death, you can enter:

• Full date — 1872-03-15, shown as 15 Mar 1872
• Year and month — 1872-03, shown as Mar 1872
• Year only — 1872, shown as 1872

The date is always shown with the precision you entered — if you only write a year, only the year is shown, not January 1.

This matters — if you enter an exact date when you're only guessing that Erik was born in 1872, you yourself won't know later what you knew and what you guessed. Enter only the year instead, and write in the note what the information is based on.

Approximate dates on events

For events, there's also Date accuracy, where you can state how certain the date is.

→ Guide: Uncertain dates

Add relationships

Once the person has been created, you can link them to other persons:

• Parents — who were the person's father and mother?
• Partner — married, engaged, cohabiting, and more. The marriage, the engagement, and the other events are linked to the relationship, and the relationship shows how it ended, for example divorced or widow. → The relationship and the events
• Children — choose the type Child in the relationship dialog, or add the parents from the child's side
• Siblings
• Other relations — godparent, witness, and similar, in both directions

PastPaths automatically works out indirect relationships (cousin, grandfather, brother-in-law) from the direct ones you've entered.

If you want to go through a person's closest relationships and check that they're right — with dates and places visible for everyone — use Research branch.

→ Read more about relationships

Places and events

The person's page has the Events and Places tabs.

Events lists everything the person took part in. Here you can:

• Add event — create a new event with the person as the primary person
• Link existing event — look up an event that already exists (at least two characters; the search looks at title, description, place, event type, tags, categories, and the names of linked persons), choose the person's role, and link it. The search covers the whole database. The results are shown 30 at a time and more are loaded as you scroll; at the bottom it says how many were found, for example "Showing 30 of 120". Events the person is already linked to are marked Already linked.

Places shows all the places the person is linked to through their events. Persons are linked to places through events, so the Add place button opens the event dialog with the person preselected. Choose an event type — for example Residence for a move — and an existing or new place. The place shows up on the tab as soon as the event is saved.

→ Read more about how places are linked to persons

Birth and death

Birth and death exist both on the person and as events, and they're linked both ways:

• If you fill in a date or place of birth or death in the form, the event is created or updated.
• If you add, change, or delete a birth or death event on the Events tab — or merge two — the person's date and place are updated. This shows in the person list, the family tree, and the search.
• Only events where the person is Primary person count. A death where the person was a witness doesn't affect the person's date of death.

If the person has several birth or death events, the date is taken from the most recently created one that has a date, and the place from the most recently created one that has a place. A person is only born and dies once, so the Events tab then shows a prompt with the Merge button. It opens the merge with the two most recently created, and the most recent one is preselected to be kept. Other events, for example moves, can exist any number of times.

Don't clear both date and place for uncertain details

If you clear both the date and the place of birth or death in the form, the person's link to the event is removed everywhere. If the person is alone in the event, the event is deleted along with its source citations and media links. PastPaths warns you before anything is saved. If the details are only uncertain — keep them and add a tag, for example "To verify".

Through events

Persons who took part in the same events — a baptism witness, the priest at a wedding, an attendee — often say something about who the person knew. The Through events section gathers them in two tables:

• Others with a role in the person's events — for example the witnesses at the person's baptism
• The person's roles in others' events — for example when the person was a witness themselves

The tables show the person, role, event, place, and whether the event has a source. The section is in the person dialog under the relationships, in Research branch, and in the edit dialog. In the person dialog, clicking the name opens the person and clicking the event opens the event.

The links come from the events' persons and roles and aren't stored separately — if you want to change a link, you change the event. It's the roles Witness, Officiant, Attendee, and Other that give links. The role holder is linked to the event's primary person and spouse. If the event has neither, they're linked to the event's other persons. The family roles parent and child give no links, since they already exist as relationships.

The links can also be shown in the family tree's network view.

Bookmark, note, and Research branch

The header of the person's page has three buttons that help you with your research:

• Bookmark — bookmark the person to come back later, with an optional note. → Bookmarks
• Research note — create a note about the person or link them to an existing one. → Research notes
• Research branch — go through the person's parents, partners, children, and siblings in tables. → Research branch

The same buttons are in the person dialog that opens from the family tree.

Profile picture

Once you've saved a new person, you can set an image that represents the person. It's shown in lists, the family tree, and reports.

To set a profile picture:

1. Go to the person's page (or find the person in the person list)
2. Click the pencil in the top right corner
3. Under Profile picture, choose one of:
   • Link existing — choose an image that's already in the media library. You can search the whole library, and the current profile picture is marked Current.
   • Upload new — upload an image from your computer. It's saved in the media library and the person is tagged in it.
   • Remove image — the person gets no profile picture. The image itself stays in the media library.

Only images can be a profile picture — documents, video, and audio can neither be chosen nor uploaded here. The profile picture also shows in the person's media gallery.

→ Read more about the media library

Today's birthdays

The welcome page automatically shows who in your family has a birthday today — matched on day and month, regardless of year. If the person is deceased, "Born X years ago" is shown instead of their current age.

Born on a leap day

If someone was born on 29 February, the birthday is shown on 1 March in years that aren't leap years, with a small note about it.

An exact date of birth (day, month, and year) is required for the person to show up in the list — a year alone isn't enough.

→ Browse the full calendar to see other days than today.

Find persons

In the person list, you can:

• Search by name, place of birth and death, tag, and category. The name search also looks at nicknames and alternate names, including a nickname together with the last name: "lisa andersson" finds Elisabet Andersson whose nickname is Lisa. The search ignores upper and lower case and accents, so "lundstrom" finds "Lundström".
• Filter by gender and status (living or deceased) and by the first letter of the last name in the A–Ö index. From the statistics, tags, and categories you get to the list filtered by, for example, a missing place of birth or a particular tag.
• Sort by name, year of birth, or year of death, ascending or descending

Search by name, filter by gender and status, and sort the result

→ Guide: Search smarter

Person statistics

On the welcome page you'll find a summary of statistics about all the persons in your family history — and a "More person statistics" link to the full statistics under Research → Person statistics.

The statistics page shows:

• Names — the most common last names, and the most common first names by gender, with the option to filter by decade of birth
• Gender distribution
• Relationships — distribution by relationship type (parent, partner, sibling, other relation) and subtype (biological, adoptive, married, half-sibling, etc.)
• Places — the most common places of birth and death, with the option to switch between place, county, and country
• Family — number of children per family and partner status (active/ended relationship)
• Age and lifespan — average age, youngest and oldest at death, and the distribution of years of birth by decade and century

Find and fix incomplete records

Cards showing how many persons have no registered place of birth or death have a "Show the persons" link that takes you straight to the person list, filtered to just those records — perfect for completing them or tagging them for follow-up.

Duplicate handling

It's easy to accidentally create two persons for the same human being — especially with a GEDCOM import. PastPaths has a feature for finding suspected duplicates and merging them.

Click **DUPLICATES** to merge persons who are documented two or more times from different branches

In the merge dialog, you can also write a free-text note (e.g. about the correct spelling when characters were garbled between programs) and tag the merge "-Investigate further" if you want to be able to find it again later.

You can choose an automatic or a manual search. You can also mark persons who aren't duplicates so they don't come up as a duplicate pair in later searches.

Under each person's details, their known parents, siblings, partners, and children are also shown — children are grouped by partner, so it's clear if the person had children with several different partners. Parents, siblings, and partners are at the same height for both persons, and siblings and children are listed in order of birth, so you can compare row by row. This makes it easier to decide whether two records really are the same person before you merge them.

The duplicate comparison also takes nicknames and alternate names into account, so "Lisa Andersson" and "Elisabet Andersson" whose nickname is Lisa are found as a possible pair.

Different dates — maybe siblings with the same name

If the persons have different dates of birth or death, the merge shows a red warning. It may be a typo, but it was also common for a later child to be given the name of a sibling who had died. If the persons share a parent, the warning says they're probably siblings. The pair stays in the duplicate list, since a digit may be a typo — check the source before you merge them.

On the Automatic search and Ignored tabs, clicking the name opens the person page, and on Manual search the arrow-out icon on the far right does the same. The back arrow leads to the same list with the same tab and selection. → Read more about the duplicate search

Parents who exist twice

If a child has two fathers or two mothers who are really the same person, the relationship check under Maintenance is often a better place to merge them — there you see the child and all the parents at the same time. → Children with more than one possible parent

→ Read more about Maintenance and persons without connections

Notes and stories

The biography and notes are shown on the Biography tab, the first tab on the person's page. You can format the text (bold, italic, lists, etc.) with the same editing tools as in the blog. The name and the tab row stay at the top of the page as you scroll, so you always see who you're reading about. The other tabs show counts — relationships, places, events, media, blog posts, and sources — so you can see right away what's there.

For short notes — "widowed early", "emigrated in 1893" — use the notes field.

For longer family stories — "Anna's journey to America" — use the blog instead. There you can format the text and add images, video, audio, and documents. Tags let you find the story later in several contexts.

Blog posts linked to the person are shown on the Blog tab on the person's page. Click a post to open it.

Delete a person

Be careful. Only delete if you're sure.

Deletion is permanent

A deleted person can't be restored. The confirmation shows what will be deleted along with the person and what will only be unlinked and kept.

Click the **trash can** to delete a person.

There are two ways to delete a person:

1. Click the trash can in the person list
2. Open a person and click the trash can

Along with the person, their relationships and the relationships' source citations, the person's source citations and bookmarks, and events where the person is the only participant are deleted. If an event has other participants, only the person is unlinked. Images, blog posts, tags, categories, and research notes are kept — only the link to the person is removed. The places of birth and death are kept as places.

Delete several persons

In list view, each row has a checkbox. Check the persons you want to delete and click Delete selected in the row above the list. The checkbox in the table header selects everyone on the page.

The selection is kept when you search, filter, or change page. So you can search for a name, sort by year of birth, and check a few, and then search for the next name. With Show selected you see the names and can remove individual persons from the selection. You can delete at most 100 persons at a time.

The confirmation shows:

• which persons will be deleted
• relationships to persons who remain — the relationships disappear but the persons stay. Here you can see whether the deletion cuts into your own tree.
• what will be deleted and what will only be unlinked, the same way as when you delete one person. An event is deleted when only selected persons take part in it.

Tick the box and click Delete. Before anything is deleted, PastPaths saves a copy of the database in Documents\PastPaths\Backups. The copy contains only the database. Images and other media files aren't deleted when persons are deleted.

Delete or merge?

Deleting is for plain errors, for example imported persons with mixed-up parents and children. If the person is a duplicate of someone you want to keep — use Duplicate handling so relationships, events, and sources are moved to the person you keep. If you want to remove everything from an import, use Undo import under Administration → Import & Export.