What is a GEDCOM file?

GEDCOM in one paragraph

GEDCOM stands for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. It is a plain-text file format, usually with the extension .ged, that stores the people in a family tree, their life events and the relationships between them. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (today’s FamilySearch) published it in 1984 so that researchers could move their work between programs, and genealogy programs still use it to exchange data today. Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy, Gramps, Ahnenblatt and MacFamilyTree all export it, as do almost all other programs.

What is inside the file

Open a .ged file in a text editor and you see numbered lines: level 0 starts a record (an INDI for an individual, a FAM for a family), deeper levels hold its details. A person record carries the name (NAME, often as "Given /Surname/"), sex, and events such as birth (BIRT), baptism, marriage (MARR, on the family record), death (DEAT) and burial, each with a date and a place. Family records link husband, wife and children by their IDs, and the next program uses these links to rebuild the tree.

• Names, including maiden names, nicknames and titles
• Dates: exact, approximate ("ABT 1890") or ranges ("BET 1890 AND 1895")
• Places as free text, often from village to country
• Relationships: parents, spouses, children, adoptions
• Notes and source citations, if the program exported them

What is usually not inside

Photos and documents are referenced by file name or URL but not embedded, so an export rarely carries the pictures themselves. DNA results, record hints and the platform’s own research tools are proprietary and never part of the file. That is why a GEDCOM export of a few hundred people is only 100 KB to 1 MB. It also makes the file a practical way to hand a tree to a printing service without sharing more than necessary, since it holds little beyond what the poster needs.

Versions: 5.5.1 and 7

GEDCOM 5.5.1 (1999, finalised 2019) is the version practically every program writes and reads; if an export dialog asks, choose it. GEDCOM 7.0 was published in 2021 and is written by FamilySearch and a few newer apps (MacFamilyTree, Ancestris, RootsMagic 9+); its structure is cleaner, but not every other program supports it yet. Character encoding matters more than the version number in daily life: UTF-8 keeps umlauts, accents and ß intact, ANSEL is the older genealogy encoding, and plain ANSI/Windows-1252 can break non-English letters. RootsOnPrint reads GEDCOM 5.5 and 5.5.1 in UTF-8, ANSEL and ANSI, and GEDCOM 7.0.

How to open a GEDCOM file

Any genealogy program opens .ged files via File › Import or File › Open: Gramps (free, Windows/macOS/Linux), RootsMagic Essentials (free), Ancestris (free, open source), Ahnenblatt (free, Windows) or the online platforms (Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch import GEDCOM into a new tree). For a quick look, a text editor works too; the file is readable, just not nicely laid out. If all you want is a poster, you do not need to open it at all. Upload it to RootsOnPrint and the live preview shows the tree within seconds.

From GEDCOM to a printed family tree

Export the file from your program (our step-by-step guides cover each platform), upload it, pick the root person and the number of generations, choose a template and a size, check the preview and order. The file is deleted from our servers 24 hours after upload; only the rendered poster goes to the print partner. Delivery takes 3–5 business days within Germany and 7–12 to the USA and Canada (framed posters only), counted from payment with printing included.