GEDCOM is forty years old, was written by a church to organise salvation, and still carries your family tree between programs. These are the long reads — what's hiding in the specification, where it came from, and which files to open first.
Associations, confidence ratings, Julian dates, custom tags and GEDZip — five things the specification allows that almost no program shows you, with the exact syntax and honest support notes.
9 September 2026 · 8 min read
1 TYPE HistoryThe format every genealogy program speaks was built to submit the dead for temple ordinances. Who made it, why BAPL and SLGC are in the standard, and who controls it in 2026.
9 September 2026 · 16 min read
1 TYPE Downloads3,010 European royals, the Harry Potter family, the Bach dynasty, the official GEDCOM 7 test file, and one man with 1,200 wives. All free, all safe to open.
9 September 2026 · 8 min read
Everything written about here can be checked against a real file in a minute. Drop a .ged into the free viewer to browse people, charts, and each person's raw record; run it through the validator to find broken links and impossible dates before an import eats them; or convert it to a printable PDF, a spreadsheet, or a one-file web page to hand to relatives.
Haven't got a file yet? The export guides cover Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, and Family Tree Maker, and the sample files page has four .ged files — including a GEDCOM 7 example and one broken on purpose — free to download. For the underlying grammar of levels, tags, and pointers, start with the GEDCOM format explained.