Practical articles on exploring, organising, and sharing family history data.
A walkthrough of this viewer. From the interactive tree to the data table, map, and validation report.
Point GED-VIEW at the folder your photos and documents live in and it will match them to your tree. Nothing is uploaded. How it works and how to pick the right folder.
Where the evidence lives in the file, how the Sources page organizes it, what PAGE and QUAY mean, and how to find people who have no sources at all.
What each check on the Issues and Source coverage pages is looking for, which ones are worth fixing first, and how to take the results back to the program that owns your tree.
What each chart in GED-VIEW is for, how to choose the person it starts from, and what is coming.
How the Events page lines up every birth, marriage, death and burial in the file chronologically, how the decade navigator and filters work, and how to narrow to one place or one kind of event.
How place names in the file become pins on a map, how GED-VIEW locates them without sending anything anywhere, and how the Places list helps you find spellings that need fixing.
Every view exports. What each format is for, the calendar files for birthdays and anniversaries, and the per-person summary of facts and citations.
A month by month view of every dated event in the file, and how to get birthdays and anniversaries onto your own calendar.
Step-by-step instructions for exporting a .ged file from Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, RootsMagic, Gramps, Family Tree Maker, Legacy, WikiTree and Geni.
The exact clicks to download an Ancestry tree as a .ged file, what the file contains, what it leaves out, and what to do next.
Where the export lives on MyHeritage, what the file includes, and a note about the sources MyHeritage generates on its own.
FamilySearch is one shared tree, not a private copy, so there is no full export button. What it does offer, and the free programs that will pull your branch down properly.
File > Export, the options that matter, and the one setting that produces a media folder alongside the .ged.
File > Export, which boxes to tick, where RootsMagic keeps media, and why its exports are unusually rich.
Family Trees > Export, the GEDCOM options dialog, and how the base media path affects the file paths in what you get.
Where WikiTree's export lives, why the file has almost no structured sources, and how living people are handled.
File > Export To > GEDCOM File, the customize screen, and the privacy choices.
Where Geni's export lives, what it includes, and the limits on how much of the shared tree you can take.
A frank list of what survives a GEDCOM move between the big sites, what is lost, and what to check after import.
There is no bulk download button. Two desktop programs will pull the tree and its media to your computer, and from there everything works.
A GEDCOM file never contains photos, only their file names. Why that is, what each website leaves out, and how to see the pictures anyway.
The usual reasons a .ged file fails to load, in the order to check them, with how to confirm each and how to fix it.
Why Müller turns into Müller, what ANSEL, UTF-8 and Windows-1252 are, how to tell which one a file is, and how to re-export it correctly.
The byte order mark problem, stray blank lines, broken continuation lines and duplicate IDs, and how to fix each in a text editor without special software.
What makes a .ged file big, what sizes are normal, and what GED-VIEW does to stay responsive on huge files.
How duplicate entries for the same person get into a tree, how to spot them, and how to compare two candidates before deciding they are one person.
Death before birth, children born to a nine-year-old, marriages after death. What GED-VIEW checks, why these errors matter, and what to fix first.
Why the list of people with no sources is the most useful report in the app, and how to turn it into a plan for what to research next.
What it means when someone in the file has no path back to the rest of the tree, the three usual causes, and what to do about each.
Why "Boston, MA" and "Boston, Massachusetts" can be two places to a computer, what GED-VIEW's geocoder resolves on its own, how to find what it cannot, and how to fix those in your desktop program.
The plain-text format every genealogy program can read and write. What it is, where it came from, what is in it, and what is not.
What the new version adds, what it removes, which programs write it, and whether it matters yet.
Tags starting with an underscore are vendor extensions. What the common ones mean, which program writes each, and what GED-VIEW does with them.
A gentle read of a real record: levels, tags, cross-references. Enough to open your own file and understand what you see.
The GEDCOM 7 package that carries photos and documents along with the tree, who supports it, and how to build one by hand.
A family tree is full of living people who never agreed to be online. What "upload" actually means, how a browser-only viewer is different, what the browser itself stores, and how to check for yourself.
The living-person problem, how the privacy options in desktop programs actually work, how to send only one branch, and what a careful share looks like from start to finish.
A plain reading of what the big sites say about keeping, sharing and deleting your tree, and the questions to ask before you upload.
Four kinds of genealogy software do four different jobs, and most people end up using at least two. What each one is for, and where GED-VIEW fits.
A maintained table of desktop programs and websites: can they read GEDCOM 7, can they write it, and can they handle GEDZIP. A snapshot, checked once a year.