GEDCOM Reader

What is GEDCOM?

GEDCOM is the standard format for exchanging genealogical data, the one FamilySearch, MyHeritage and Ancestry use when exporting. Each record carries a level, a tag and a value.

An individual (0 @I1@ INDI) brings tags such as NAME, SEX, BIRT (with DATE/PLAC sub-tags) and DEAT. Families (0 @F1@ FAM), in turn, link parents to children.

All the parsing happens locally, in your browser.

What is GEDCOM: the 1984 LDS Church standard for family-tree exchange

GEDCOM, short for Genealogical Data Communication, is a plain-text file format that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) first released in 1984 through its Family History Department. The goal was practical. They needed one neutral container that could carry genealogy data between different programs, computers and operating systems without mangling the structure of names, dates, families and sources along the way. Four decades on, GEDCOM remains the genealogy industry's de facto standard. Nearly every desktop application and every major online platform reads and writes .ged files, which is about as close to a shared, interoperable language as family historians have ever gotten.

Underneath, a GEDCOM file is just a hierarchical text document. Each line opens with a number marking the nesting depth, then a tag (three or four uppercase letters) and an optional value. Tags can point to cross-identifiers written between @ signs, and that pointer is what links an individual record to a family record, a source citation or a note. The designers wanted something human-readable, diff-friendly and small enough to fit on a mid-1980s floppy disk. That bare-bones quality turned out to be a virtue. A GEDCOM file written in 1992 still parses cleanly in a modern reader, because the lineage-linked data model has stayed backwards compatible through revision after revision.

This reader loads a .ged file straight into your browser, walks the line-by-line structure and gives you a quick count of how many individuals (INDI) and families (FAM) the file holds. Nothing leaves your machine. The parsing runs client-side in JavaScript, and that matters here: GEDCOM files routinely hold very personal details about living relatives, medical events, religious ordinances and private notes, the kind of thing researchers would rather not hand to a third-party server.

Structure: INDI, FAM, SOUR, NOTE and REPO records

A GEDCOM file is built around a handful of top-level record types, each one flagged by a tag at level 0. The ones you'll run into most often:

• INDI — a single person, carrying sub-tags such as NAME, SEX, BIRT, DEAT, OCCU;
• FAM — a family unit that ties partners (HUSB, WIFE) and children (CHIL) together, plus events like MARR and DIV;
• SOUR — a source citation: a book, a parish register, a census, a DNA test;
• NOTE — free-form text notes you can hang off any other record;
• REPO — a repository, meaning the archive or library where a source physically lives;
• OBJE — a multimedia object (photo, scan, audio) pointed to by file path or, in 7.0, packed inside a Zip;
• SUBM — the submitter, whoever produced the file.

Here's what a bare-minimum individual record looks like:

0 @I1@ INDI
1 NAME John /Smith/
2 GIVN John
2 SURN Smith
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 12 MAR 1850
2 PLAC Boston, Massachusetts, USA
1 DEAT
2 DATE 4 JUL 1921
1 FAMS @F1@
1 SOUR @S1@
2 PAGE Page 45, entry 12

The indentation here is logical, not visual. The leading integer (0, 1, 2, 3…) is what tells the parser how deep the line sits in the tree. Cross-references like @I1@ and @F1@ stitch the records together. An individual points to the families they belong to (FAMS as spouse, FAMC as child), and the family points right back to its members. Because that linking runs both ways, a GEDCOM reader can walk an entire tree starting from one root person.

Versions: 5.5, 5.5.1 (2019) and FamilySearch GEDCOM 7.0 (2021)

The format has gone through several revisions. Version 5.5 landed in 1996 and became the baseline that nearly every genealogy program of the late 1990s and 2000s supported. Version 5.5.1 was drafted back in 1999, but it wasn't formally released until 15 November 2019, after twenty years of everyone already using it in practice. That release standardised UTF-8 as the recommended encoding, cleaned up how email addresses are handled, and added a few small improvements to multimedia and place records.

At the 2020 RootsTech conference, FamilySearch kicked off a community effort to modernise the standard. Out of it came FamilySearch GEDCOM 7.0, published on 7 June 2021. This is the first version that breaks backward compatibility deliberately: a file produced under 7.0 generally isn't a valid 5.5.1 file, and the reverse holds too. The big changes include mandatory UTF-8 encoding, a stricter specification you can actually check by machine, reworked note and shared-note records, a new .gdz Zip package that bundles the GEDCOM file with its referenced media, more flexible date and age expressions, and explicit support for diverse family structures. On that last point the spec is clear that the sex or gender of partners must not be inferred from whether they're tagged HUSB or WIFE.

GEDCOM X: the JSON modernisation attempt

Alongside the classic line-oriented format, FamilySearch built GEDCOM X, a more ambitious data model serialised in JSON (and optionally XML). It was meant to support web APIs, richer source linking and the "conclusion model" that the FamilySearch Family Tree uses internally. Modern as it is technically, GEDCOM X hasn't pushed the classic format out of everyday desktop-to-desktop exchange. Through the 2020s it shows up mostly for bulk transfers and direct API integration with FamilySearch, while plain GEDCOM, now in its 7.0 incarnation, stays the lingua franca for moving one researcher's tree from one tool to another.

Compatible software: Ancestry, MyHeritage, Geni, Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Gramps

GEDCOM has lasted four decades for one reason above all: it's everywhere. Every major genealogy ecosystem can import and export .ged files, though each vendor tends to implement the standard with its own subtle dialect:

• Ancestry.com — exports your online tree as a 5.5.1 GEDCOM from the tree settings;
• MyHeritage — takes a GEDCOM upload to seed a new family site, and exports your tree whenever you ask;
• FamilySearch Family Tree — reads and writes the latest 7.0 spec natively;
• Geni — handles GEDCOM import and export, with file-size limits that depend on your tier;
• Family Tree Maker — a long-running desktop program with full GEDCOM round-trip support;
• RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Heredis, Reunion (Mac) — desktop clients that serious genealogists lean on heavily;
• Gramps — the most widely used open-source genealogy program, fully GEDCOM-compatible;
• webtrees, TNG, Geneanet — web platforms for self-hosted or community trees.

Use cases: backup, migration, academic research and digital inheritance

GEDCOM is the standard answer to four pretty different problems. Backup: exporting your tree as a .ged file means decades of research aren't held hostage by one vendor. If the company folds or jacks up its prices, the data is still yours. Migration: moving from Ancestry to MyHeritage, or off a desktop program onto a web platform, nearly always runs through a GEDCOM export-and-import cycle. Academic and historical research: historians, demographers and population geneticists swap GEDCOM datasets to study migration patterns, surname distributions and kinship networks. Digital inheritance: a GEDCOM file handed down to children or to a local genealogical society outlasts a proprietary database file by a wide margin, because plain text stays readable by future software long after today's apps are gone.

Limitations: non-binary relationships, adoption and complex modern families

For all its staying power, GEDCOM was designed in 1984 around the western nuclear family, and that legacy still shows. Historically the format leans on HUSB and WIFE tags that assume a gendered, two-parent couple, so same-sex couples, multiple co-parents, surrogates and donors have to be shoehorned in with notes or non-standard extensions. Adoption does get a PEDI sub-tag (adopted, foster, birth), yet multi-stage adoption journeys, step-parent adoption and open adoptions with ongoing contact come out poorly modelled. A multi-person event like a census household forces you to repeat the same data on each individual, and ordering events when the dates are unknown is awkward at best.

Version 7.0 takes the edge off some of this. Partner tags no longer carry gender semantics, shared notes cut down on duplication, and the spec is far stricter so parsers behave the same way. Even so, the underlying lineage-linked model still assumes a tree-shaped genealogy rather than the network-shaped reality of modern families. Researchers dealing with complicated blended households tend to treat GEDCOM as a portable exchange format and lean on the richer internal model of their preferred application, or on GEDCOM X, for the day-to-day editing.

FAQ

Is my GEDCOM file uploaded to a server? No. The reader parses the file entirely in your browser with JavaScript, and nothing goes over the network.

Which versions does the reader accept? Any line-oriented GEDCOM, 5.5, 5.5.1 and 7.0 included. It counts INDI and FAM records no matter which version the file declares.

Why do I see strange characters in old files? Files from before 7.0 sometimes use ANSEL or Windows-1252 encodings. If the accents come out garbled, re-save the file as UTF-8 from your genealogy program first, then load it here.

Can I edit the file with this tool? Not yet. This is a read-only inspector. For editing, reach for a dedicated program like Gramps, RootsMagic or Family Tree Maker, then re-export to GEDCOM when you're done.

What is the difference between .ged and .gdz? .ged is the plain-text genealogy file. .gdz, which arrived with GEDCOM 7.0, is a Zip container that bundles the .ged file together with every piece of referenced media (photos, scans, audio).