Persons

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

Create a person

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

Add, remove, and edit persons. Click the pencil to edit information about the person and add a profile picture.

Fill in the form with:

• First name (required)
• Last name
• Nickname — what the person was informally called
• Alternate names — former names, name prefixes, or aliases found in sources (free text, separate multiple with semicolons)
• Gender — male, female, or leave blank 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

You don't need to fill in everything

It's completely 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

→ Read more about how places work

Living persons

For currently living relatives, you can mark the person as "living." This automatically hides sensitive details from printouts and reports.

• If you know the person has passed away but don't have a year or date, you can check the box.
  
• You don't need to enter an exact date in PastPaths — just a year, or a year and month, works too.
  
• You can write a biography and notes about the person and add relationships to several other people.

The person-form

GDPR and living relatives

Keep in mind that information about currently living people falls under data protection regulations. PastPaths makes it easy to keep your data private (everything is local), but it's still worth asking your relatives if they're okay with their information being saved — especially if you share printouts or GEDCOM files with others.

Date precision

PastPaths understands that old dates are rarely exact. You can enter:

• Exact date — 15 March 1872
• Just a year — 1872
• Approximate — around 1870
• Before — before 1880
• After — after 1865
• Between — between 1870 and 1875

This matters — if you enter an exact date when you're only guessing that Erik was born in 1872, you won't be able to tell later what you knew and what you guessed. With "around 1872" you'll remember.

Add relationships

Once a person is created, you can link them to other people:

• Parents — who was the person's father and mother?
• Partner — married, cohabiting, engaged
• Children — usually linked automatically when you enter parents on the child's page

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

Profile picture

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

To set a profile picture:

1. Go to the person's page
2. Click the pencil icon in the top right corner
3. Upload an image

For now, the image isn't saved to the media library and can't be picked from there. That's planned for future versions.

Finding persons

In the persons list, you can:

• Search by name: type the beginning of a name, filter by gender and relationship status, and sort the results.
• Filter by birth year, place, gender, tags
• Sort alphabetically or by date of birth

Click **DUPLICATES** to merge persons that have been documented two or more times from different branches of the family.
Click the **trash can** to delete a person.

Duplicate handling

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

In the merge dialog, you can also write a free note (e.g. about the correct spelling when there's an encoding mismatch between programs) and tag the merge "Investigate further" if you want to be able to find it again later.

Each person's details also show known parents, siblings, partners, and children — children are grouped by partner, so it's clear if the person had children with more than one partner. This makes it easier to judge whether two records really are the same person before you merge them.

→ Read more about Maintenance and persons without connections

Notes and stories

Biography and notes are shown in their own tab, Biography, the first tab on the person's page. You can format the text (bold, italic, lists, etc.) with the same editor used in the blog. The name and tab bar stay fixed at the top of the page while you scroll, so you always see who you're reading about.

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

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

Delete a person

Be careful. Only delete if you're sure.

Deletion is permanent

A deleted person cannot be undone. Before removing someone — check that the person isn't linked to events, photos, or sources you want to keep.

There are two ways to delete a person: 1. Click the trash can in the persons list 2. Open a person and click the trash can