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I want to filter and analyze my data with Bases

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Use this when your tree has grown beyond what’s practical to browse note-by-note — typically 100+ person notes — and you want to ask analytical questions: “who’s missing a death date?”, “how many people were born in a specific county?”, “which decade has the most marriages?” Obsidian Bases gives you a spreadsheet-like surface across your vault’s frontmatter, and Charted Roots ships pre-configured Bases templates for People, Sources, Events, Places, Organizations, and Universes.

By the end you’ll have the Bases templates created in your vault, you’ll know how to use the built-in views, and you’ll be able to create custom views for your own questions.

What you’ll need
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  • Obsidian 1.7.2 or later (Bases is built into Obsidian — no separate plugin install).
  • A populated vault — at minimum 20-30 person notes; ideally 100+ to make the analytical surface meaningful.

Steps
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1. Create the Bases templates
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Charted Roots ships pre-configured Bases for each entity type. Create them in one pass:

  • Command palette → Charted Roots: Create all base templates.
  • Or via Control Center → each entity tab has a Create base template action.

The command creates .base files in your vault — one per entity type. Default location is configurable under Settings → Charted Roots → Folders → Bases folder.

2. Open the People base
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In the file explorer, find people.base and open it. The default view is a table showing every person note with name, birth, death, and other key fields as columns.

3. Use a built-in view
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The People base ships with several pre-configured views. Click the view selector (top-left) to switch:

  • All People — flat list, every person.
  • By Birth Year — sorted chronologically by birth.
  • By Place — grouped by birth place.
  • Missing Death Date — filtered to people without died or death_date set.
  • Missing Birth Date — same shape for birth.
  • By Collection — grouped by collection property.

Pick the one that matches your question. The view filters/sorts/groups update live as you edit underlying person notes.

People base in Bases — table view with the view selector showing the built-in pre-configured views, a representative filter applied across the columns

4. Create a custom view
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For your own questions, create a custom view. Click + New view in the view selector. Configure:

  • Filter — predicates against frontmatter. E.g., birth_place contains "Boston" finds everyone born in Boston (any spelling variant).
  • Sort — by any property. E.g., sort by born ascending for chronological order.
  • Group by — collapses rows under group headers. E.g., group by father to see siblings together.
  • Properties (columns) — pick which frontmatter properties to display.

Save the view with a descriptive name. It persists in the .base file alongside the built-in views.

5. Cross-reference findings
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Bases is a read-and-filter surface. When a view surfaces something interesting (a geographic cluster, a generation with missing data, a research gap), open the underlying person notes to act on it. Bases doesn’t replace the Edit Person modal — it’s the discovery layer that points you at the right notes.

Variations
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  • Other entity types. The Sources base, Events base, Places base, and Organizations base each have their own templates with relevant views (e.g., Sources has “By Type”, “By Repository”, “Missing Media”; Places has “By Coordinate Status”, “By Hierarchy Level”). Open each base file to explore.
  • Cross-base queries. Bases doesn’t currently support joining across multiple base files. To answer a question like “which people in collection X have sources from repository Y?”, you’d combine views — open the Sources base filtered to repository Y, identify the people referenced, then check those in the People base.
  • Bulk edits via Bases. Bases supports inline editing of frontmatter — change a value in the table, and the underlying note’s frontmatter updates. Useful for bulk corrections (e.g., normalizing place name variants).
  • Export a view. Bases doesn’t have a native export, but copy-paste from the table works for moving data into a spreadsheet. Useful for sharing a snapshot with a non-Obsidian collaborator.

Related guides#

Reference
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