What is a GEDCOM file, and how do you get yours?
A GEDCOM file (.ged) is your family tree saved in the one format every family-tree program understands: every person, date, place and relationship, as plain text. FamilySearch created it in 1984 so family history could move between programs, and the current version, FamilySearch GEDCOM 7, came out in 2021. If your tree is in a program or on a website, you can almost always export it as a GEDCOM and take it anywhere.
What's inside one.
People, their births, marriages and deaths, the places, the relationships that join them, and the sources you've attached. It doesn't carry the photographs themselves; GEDCOM 7 added a companion format, GEDZIP, for sending the file and its media together. The specification is public and maintained by FamilySearch.
How to get yours out.
- MyHeritage: under Family tree, choose Manage trees, then Export to GEDCOM beside the tree (MyHeritage's steps).
- FamilySearch Family Tree: FamilySearch doesn't export its shared tree itself. Its own help says it "does not currently have a feature that allows you to create a GEDCOM from the FamilySearch Family Tree", and its old Family Tree Export page now points to the apps in its Solutions Gallery.
- RootsMagic, Ancestral Quest, Legacy Family Tree and most desktop programs: look for Export or Save as GEDCOM in the File menu.
- Ancestry: open the tree, choose More, then Tree Settings, then Export tree (Ancestry's steps). Only the tree's owner can export it.
Why it matters.
A GEDCOM is how your tree stays yours. It's the backup you keep, the way you move to a better program, and the file you can hand to a cousin. Keep one somewhere safe, and make a new one after every big session.
Or just ask.
AncestralFire does these steps with you. Tell it one name, and it reads your tree, searches FamilySearch Family Tree once you connect it, and tells you what it found, with the source behind each fact. A real answer:
(The published Kennedy file, brought in from the first screen.)
The tree at a glance: 208 people · 75 families · born 1728–1984. Commonest surnames: Kennedy, Bouvier, Caulfield, Mahoney, Skakel, Fitzgerald.
What AncestralFire showed seconds after the Kennedy family's published GEDCOM was brought in.
See a whole conversation on How it works, or what it finds in one family: Queen Victoria's family tree, from Kew to Windsor.
Keep reading.
- How to use FamilySearch, and what to ask it. FamilySearch is free: there's only one kind of account, and it costs nothing.
- Start a family tree from almost nothing. Start with yourself and go back one generation at a time: your parents, then your grandparents, writing down only what you know and where you learned it.