Heritage AIGuide: GEDCOM files
How to open a GEDCOM (.ged) file
A .ged file is plain text holding people, dates, places and family links by the rules of the GEDCOM format. Many genealogy programs write it. You can open it in three ways: a text editor, a viewer in your browser, or by uploading it to an online tree.
The product is currently available in Russian for families in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
What is inside the file
The file is made of lines: a level, a tag and a value. The record "0 @I1@ INDI" opens a person, "1 NAME" sets the name, "1 BIRT" with a nested "2 DATE" is a birth, "0 @F1@ FAM" is a family with husband, wife and children. The file starts with "0 HEAD" and ends with "0 TRLR".
There are no photographs or documents in the file: GEDCOM stores text only.
Way 1. A text editor
You can open the file in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. You see what is inside, but kinship is hard to read: it is written as numbers.
If you see question marks or odd characters instead of Cyrillic letters, the cause is the encoding. The file may have been saved in Windows-1251 or UTF-16 and the editor read it as UTF-8. Open the file with a different encoding or use the next way.
Way 2. A GEDCOM viewer in your browser
The viewer on our site needs no registration and no installation. It runs in the browser: the file stays on your computer and is not sent anywhere. It detects the encoding itself (UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1251, ANSEL) and shows people, years of life, places and the number of families. The list of people can be saved as CSV for Excel.
Way 3. Upload it to an online tree
If you need the file as a living tree, upload it in the Family tree section: in the "..." menu choose the GEDCOM upload. You see a preview first, and nothing is written until you confirm the import.
Uploading is free and the file can be up to 20 MB. On upload the file is sent to our server and handled like the rest of your archive's data. It may contain living people, so for simple viewing use the browser viewer from way 2.
Photos and documents have to be added to the media library separately: they are not in GEDCOM.
How to tell the file is intact
Open it in the viewer: if the number of people looks like your tree and names read correctly, the file is intact. In a text editor, check that it starts with "0 HEAD" and ends with "0 TRLR". A file cut short during download usually stops mid-word with no "0 TRLR".
Questions and answers
What opens a .ged file?
Any text editor, to see the contents, or a GEDCOM viewer in the browser, to see people, years and places. For a living tree, upload the file in the Family tree section.
Why do I see odd characters instead of Cyrillic letters?
Most likely the file is not UTF-8 but Windows-1251 or UTF-16. Open it with the viewer on our site: it detects the encoding itself.
Can I open .ged in Word or Excel?
In Word it opens as plain text, with no kinship. For Excel, the viewer on our site saves the list of people as a CSV file.
Does the file hold photographs?
No. GEDCOM stores text only: people, dates, places and links. Photos and documents are added separately.
Is the file sent anywhere?
Not in the viewer: the file is read in your browser. When you upload it to the Family tree section, it is sent to our server and handled like the rest of your archive's data.
Open it, check it, move it
Check the file in the browser first. Upload it only when you want a living tree.