Difference between revisions of "GEDCOM"

What is it?

GEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. GEDCOM was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an aid to genealogical research. A GEDCOM file is plain text (usually either ANSEL or ASCII) containing genealogical information about individuals, and meta data linking these records together.

Most genealogy software supports importing from and/or exporting to GEDCOM format. However, some genealogy software programs incorporate the use of proprietary extensions to the GEDCOM format, which are not always recognized by other genealogy programs. The GEDCOM TestBook Project evaluates how well popular genealogy programs conform to the GEDCOM 5.5 standard. Additionally, many tools exist to convert GEDCOM files to HTML pages.

GEDCOM Export

GEDCOM import and export has been one of your top requests. We're starting with the export of GEDCOM files as an "alpha" feature: we know that GEDCOM import may be an important part of your genealogy research and we want to make sure we get it right.

A few notes: this is our first step along the path to exporting your full Geni tree to your GEDCOM file. Because privacy has been one of our other top user requests, this alpha version will export only very basic information from a limited family tree — basically, the names and relationships of your blood relatives and their current spouses. In addition, this GEDCOM export treats your spouse/partner as a blood relation, so all of his/her blood realtives and current spouses will be included as well.

To download your GEDCOM file, make sure you are logged in to Geni and click the link corresponding to the file version you'd like to try:

• GEDCOM 5.5
• GEDCOM 6.0

Let us know in this forum whether the file looks and works as you'd expect. We'd also like to hear your concerns with what information you would want to be exportable. (We are aware that many of you are even more interested in importing of GEDCOM files. That is a longer project that involves our tree merging features--we'll keep you updated in this forum as we get closer.)

Thank you for trying this out and have a great week—the Geni Team is looking forward to your feedback.

From: GEDCOM Export on the Geni forum

GEDCOM Import

GEDCOM import is currently being worked on. It will be released after the required features (profile merging and tree merging) are implemented.