GEDCOM Files Explained

GEDCOM stands for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. It's a plain-text file format, usually ending in .ged, designed to hold an entire family tree — every person, every birth and death date, every marriage, every parent-child and spousal relationship — in a form that any genealogy program can read. It was created in the 1980s by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints specifically so family history data wouldn't get locked inside a single piece of software.

What's actually inside a GEDCOM file

Open one in a text editor and it looks cryptic at first: short lines starting with numbers and tags like INDI (individual), FAM (family unit), BIRT (birth), and MARR (marriage). Underneath the odd formatting, it's just a structured list. Each person gets a record with their name and vital events. Each family unit links a husband, a wife, and their children by ID number. String enough of those records together and you've rebuilt an entire tree, generations deep, in a file small enough to email.

Why it matters to you

Say you spent three years building a tree on one genealogy platform. If that platform raises its prices, shuts down, or simply isn't the right tool anymore, GEDCOM is your exit door. Nearly every genealogy program — Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, and most independent family tree apps — can export your tree as a GEDCOM file and import a GEDCOM file someone else exported. Your research stays yours, portable across whatever tool you're using five or ten years from now.

Common places GEDCOM shows up

You'll run into GEDCOM in a few predictable moments: switching genealogy platforms, backing up your tree outside whatever service hosts it, sharing your research with a relative who uses a different app, or restoring a tree after starting fresh somewhere new. It's not something you need to understand deeply to use it. Export, save the file somewhere safe, and import it wherever you need your tree to show up next.

What GEDCOM doesn't handle well

The format is old and was built around vital records, not modern extras like high resolution photos, long-form stories, or embedded media. Most platforms handle this by exporting GEDCOM for the structural data (people, dates, relationships) and offering a separate export, like a ZIP archive, for photos and attachments. If you're moving platforms, check whether you need both.