Guides
Step-by-step help for understanding, opening, checking and repairing GEDCOM family tree files — written in plain words, with small real examples you can check by hand.
What Is a GEDCOM File? The Family Tree Format Explained
Someone sends you a file. It ends in .ged. You double-click it and nothing useful happens. Or a family history site offers you a download button and calls…
How to Open a GEDCOM File (and Why It Sometimes Fails)
A GEDCOM file lands in your inbox or your downloads folder. You double-click it. Your computer shrugs. No app claims it, or a text editor opens and shows…
Why GEDCOM Exports Fail Validation — and How to Fix Them
You export your tree. The file looks fine. Then a validator, a new program, or the GedConvert tool on the home page reads it and hands you a list of…
GEDCOM 5.5.1 vs 7.0: What Changed and When to Convert
For about twenty years, one version of GEDCOM ran family history: 5.5.1. Then, in 2021, GEDCOM 7.0 arrived. It was the first new version in more than two…
How to Convert a GEDCOM File to Excel or CSV
A family tree is easy to browse and hard to scan. In a tree view you see one family at a time. In a table you see everyone at once. You can sort by birth…
GEDCOM Encoding Errors: ANSEL, UTF-8 and the Garbled Names Problem
A name comes out wrong. José becomes José. Müller becomes M?ller. A Polish town loses half its letters and gains a row of boxes. The rest of the file…
Broken Links in a GEDCOM File: What They Are and How to Repair Them
A family tree is not a list. It is a web. This person is the child of that family. That family is made of these two partners. This birth is backed by that…
Why Your Family Tree Gets Locked In — and How GEDCOM Sets It Free
You did the work. Years of evenings: census pages, parish records, photos from a cousin, names chased through three spellings. Then you try to leave the…
GEDCOM Dates Explained: Calendars, Ranges and Impossible Birthdays
Dates are the spine of a family tree. They order lives, prove identities, and separate the John Smith you want from the four you do not. They are also the…
How to Back Up Your Family Tree So No Platform Can Hold It Hostage
Family trees are lost in quiet ways. A laptop dies. A password is forgotten. A service closes, or an account lapses while life is busy. No one means to…