Advice needed GEDCOM files? (General)

by slowhands , proud of his ancient Dean Forest roots, Sunday, October 14, 2007, 01:58 (6253 days ago) @ fredb

Fred, So you want a verbose debate ? :-)

To enable sharing of information between computer applications an agreed structure / format and language are required.

For Family history work that interchange format was called GEDCOM, and has evolved over the years from what was initially an ASCII text file. I think v5.5 is the latest agreed specification.

In the IT world XML is taking over from text as the "language" for document exchange. So GEDCOM is evolving and GEDCOM v6.0 is I think based on being able to understand XML documents.

There are numerous Viewer / Tree maker / editor programs available to read in GEDCOM files - some free - others chargable.

There are also many programs, such as Legacy ,that allow you to create your database of family history, they will have their own internal method of storing that data , but almost all will allow you to read in and write out your data in a GEDCOM format.