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The following description is adapted from Dennis Howes' original Help file for !Family:
GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) is the de facto international standard for genealogical data, specified by Mormon church. Genealogical databases for personal computers use the "Lineage-linked form", though the basic grammar supports other forms. This is the form used as its native database by X!Family.
If you look up "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" in your 'phone book you may find a "Family History Centre" listed. There you can search gigabytes of genealogical data on CDROM, copy bits to a file in GEDCOM format, bring it home on floppy disc, and load it into X!Family. Some of this information (in particular, the International Genealogical Index) is also available online at www.familysearch.org, the main LDS website, and can be downloaded in GEDCOM format.
GEDCOM files are actually plain ASCII. It is not necessary to understand their format but the following explanation is included for the curious. Each line describes an object and is of the form
level [@id@] tag value
where level is a number. Objects at level n are sub-objects of those at level n-1. The top-level (0) objects are things like individuals (tag = "INDI") and families (tag = "FAM"). Individuals have sub-objects with tags like NAME, BIRT, DEAT, FAMS and FAMC. A FAMS object has a value like @F12@ which is a cross-reference to a (level 0) FAM object with id = F12. This is a family in which the individual is a spouse (or parent). A FAMC object also has a cross-reference to a FAM object for a family in which the person is a child. FAM objects have HUSB, WIFE and CHIL sub-objects whose values are cross-references back to individuals. Here is an example. The comments after the semicolons ";" in the following are not part of the GEDCOM, and would not be in a real GEDCOM file:
0 @I1@ INDI ; An individual 1 NAME John ; called John 1 FAMC @F1@ ; is a child in family F1 0 @I2@ INDI 1 NAME David ; David 1 FAMS @F1@ ; is a parent in F1 0 @I3@ INDI 1 NAME Mary ; Mary 1 FAMS @F1@ ; is a parent in F1 0 @F1@ FAM ; Family F1 includes 1 HUSB @I2@ ; David, the father 1 WIFE @I3@ ; Mary, the mother 1 CHIL @I1@ ; John, a child
The GEDCOM standard defines many more tags than are used by X!Family. Objects which are not recognised are not displayed but are preserved when the file is saved. For full details of GEDCOM, write to
gedcom@gedcom.org GEDCOM Coordinator Family History Department 50 East North Temple Salt Lake City UT 84150 USA
A technical description of the grammar of GEDCOM, along with all the tags defined in the current version is supposedly to be found among the official, current GEDCOM documents available by anonymous ftp at ftp.gedcom.org in the directory /pub/genealogy/gedcom. When I tried to get these documents, I got "domain name ftp.gedcom.org does not exist". However, a Google search for "GEDCOM standard tag" usually produces a number of useful documents.
Although GEDCOM files can be edited with an ordinary text editor, this requires considerable care not to create entries which are inconsistent with each other, particularly cross-references between families and their members. If you frequently find yourself editing a GEDCOM manually, please let the X!Family developer know at family-maint/at/nospam.pennine.demon.co.uk, and the features you need supported will be considered for inclusion in future releases.
Some PC programs (eg. Legacy and Win-Family) require GEDCOM lines to end with carriage return. Following the standard, X!Family writes them out with line feed and reads in any combination of CR and LF. Use a text editor or other tool to change LF to CR if you must use broken software.
X!Family understands the basic grammar of GEDCOM files, but only supports a subset of the tags. Anything it doesn't understand is preserved (unlike some genealogy software which simply discards those bits). If you import a GEDCOM file conforming to an old version, and modify it with X!Family, which is mainly based on the 5.3 revision (but uses some tags first defined at 5.4), you may end up with a GEDCOM which contains a mix of features from recent versions, and old features no longer supported by some Genealogy programs. For example, Personal Ancestral File 4.03 will import GEDCOM 4.0 files and GEDCOM 5.5 files, converting everything to 5.5, but doesn't understand some tags from the 5.3 version, which it simply moans about at length, then discards. Keeping your databases in X!Family will guarantee not to throw away any data, no matter what GEDCOM revision your base data conforms to, as long as it does indeed adhere to the correct grammar.
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