GEDCOM
GEDCOM is the open standard for exchanging family trees between programs. FamilyTree keeps your tree in a GEDCOM file of your own, so you can always take it to another program. The standard itself is published at gedcom.io.
Versions
| Version | |
|---|---|
| Saves | GEDCOM 7.0 — a plain .ged file in UTF-8, next to a folder with the photos |
| Opens | GEDCOM 7.0 and GEDCOM 5.5.1 (also older ANSI files, for instance from AGES) |
| Exports | GEDCOM 7.0, GEDZIP (.gdz, GEDCOM 7 with the photos in one file) and GEDCOM 5.5.1 for programs that do not read version 7 yet |
A 5.5.1 file is converted the first time you save it; a copy of the original is kept next to it. What FamilyTree writes has been checked with two independent GEDCOM 7 validators.
What is supported
- People and families, with birth, baptism, death, burial, marriage and divorce
- Dates as in the standard: exact, about, before, after, between, from…to, and the Julian calendar
- Places as one text:
[postcode ]Place, Region, COUNTRY, with residences per phase of life - Notes, sources and citations
- Photos, memorial cards, gravestones and documents, including where each person appears on a group photo
- Unique identifiers (
UID), so two files can be merged reliably - Anything FamilyTree does not use itself — including tags from other programs — is kept unchanged
Tested with files from other programs
FamilyTree is tested with GEDCOM files that other programs wrote. Every file has to open, come through saving as GEDCOM 7 without losing anything, and merge both with itself and with another family tree without leaving a broken link. About 180 files have been through that test.
| Program | Versions |
|---|---|
| AGES | 1.50 and later |
| Ancestris | 11 |
| Brother’s Keeper | 5.2 |
| EasyTree | 1.0 |
| Family Origins | 5 |
| Family Tree Maker | 10, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22 (Windows and Mac) and 24 |
| Ftree | 1.9 |
| GEDitCOM | 2.9 |
| Gramps | 2.2, 3.3 and 5.1 |
| Heredis | 14 |
| Legacy Family Tree | 3.3 and 10 |
| LifeLines | 3.0 |
| My Family Tree | 10 |
| My Roots (Palm OS) | 4 |
| MyHeritage Family Tree Builder | 7 and 8 |
| Personal Ancestral File (PAF) | 2.2, 5.1 and 5.2 |
| RootsMagic | 7 and 8 |
| The Master Genealogist | 1.2 |
| webtreeprint | 1.0 |
Besides those, the official test files: the GEDCOM 7 examples of FamilySearch (gedcom.io), the GEDCOM 5.5.5 samples of gedcom.org, the GEDCOM 5.5 torture test, and files that try out every combination: same-sex marriages, a family with only children, a person married to themselves. And every character set that occurs: UTF-8, UTF-16, ANSEL, ANSI (Windows-1252), Latin-1 and the old IBM PC set, with every kind of line ending.
What a merge with such a file cannot settle on its own — two people with the same name and no dates, as with royal houses and gods — FamilyTree puts to you instead of guessing. Errors that are already in a file, such as a link to a record that does not exist, are reported under Checks.
FamilyTree’s own tags
A few things the standard has no tag for are stored in extension tags. They are
announced in the file header (HEAD.SCHMA) with a link to this page, as
GEDCOM 7 requires. Other programs simply keep them.
| Tag | On | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
_KIND | media | kind of image: PORTRAIT, MEMORIAL_CARD, GRAVESTONE, HISTORICAL_DOCUMENT or FAMILY_PHOTO |
_PHASE | media | phase of life of a portrait: Birth, Youth, Adult or Senior |
_ORIG | media | the untouched original of a cropped portrait |
_FROM | media | the family photo a portrait was cut from |
_DATE | media | the date of a family photo |
A promise
From version 1.0 on, the file format is a promise: tags may be added, but a tag never changes meaning or disappears, and whatever FamilyTree does not know stays in the file.