For over twenty years there was one GEDCOM that mattered: 5.5.1. In 2021 FamilySearch published GEDCOM 7, the first real revision in a generation. Files in both versions are around, and will be for a long time.

The short answer

GED-VIEW reads both, including media references in either. If a program offers a choice, 7 is cleaner; 5.5.1 is what more things can read. For sending a file to someone else, 5.5.1 is still the safe pick.

What GEDCOM 7 changed

  • Encoding. 7 requires UTF-8. 5.5.1 allowed ANSEL, ASCII and others, which is where most garbled-character problems came from.
  • Long text. 5.5.1 split long notes across lines with CONC and CONT, and programs got it wrong constantly. 7 removed CONC. Notes can be long lines, with CONT only for real line breaks.
  • Media. 7 introduced GEDZIP, a zip file containing the .ged plus its photos and documents. For the first time, media can travel with the tree in one package.
  • Extensions. 5.5.1 let programs invent their own tags starting with an underscore (_APID, _UID and so on), with no way to know what they meant. 7 has a mechanism for declaring extensions in the header, and a standard tag (EXID) for external identifiers like Ancestry's record references.
  • Dates and places. Tighter rules on how dates are written, and a way to attach a free-text phrase alongside a structured date. GED-VIEW reads every date form of both versions: exact dates in any precision, about, calculated and estimated dates, before and after, between ranges and from-to periods, interpreted dates with their phrase, dual years such as 1750/51, BCE years, Julian dates (converted for sorting and anniversaries, shown as written), Hebrew and French Republican calendar dates, and the GEDCOM 7 date phrase. Place names in other scripts (TRAN) and coordinates under a place are read too.
  • Shared notes. A note can be its own record and be referenced from several places, instead of being copied.
  • Cleanup. Duplicate ways of doing the same thing were removed. A few rarely used structures went away.

What did not change

The basic shape. Levels, tags, cross-references, INDI and FAM records. A GEDCOM 7 file is recognizably the same format.

Every version, in one list

  • 1 to 4 (1984 to 1989). The early drafts from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, made to move data between its own programs. Extinct; no file in circulation uses them.
  • 5.3 (1993). The first version other software adopted widely. Introduced the ANSEL character set that caused accent trouble for decades.
  • 5.5 (1996). The version that settled the record types still used today: INDI, FAM, SOUR, REPO, OBJE, NOTE.
  • 5.5.1 (1999). A small revision of 5.5 that added UTF-8, email and web addresses, and a few tags. It sat as a draft for twenty years and was only formally released in 2019, but nearly every program and website has written it since the early 2000s. This is the file almost everyone has.
  • 5.5.5 (2019). A community edition, not from FamilySearch: 5.5.1 with stricter rules and a few removals. Rarely written.
  • 5.6 (around 2000). A draft that was never published. Ignore it.
  • 7.0 (2021). The current standard, described above.

Two things that are not GEDCOM versions: GEDCOM X is a separate JSON and XML format from FamilySearch that no program exports family files in, and GEDZIP is not a version but a package format introduced with 7. GED-VIEW reads everything from 5.3 onward.

Who writes GEDCOM 7

At the time of writing: FamilySearch's limited download, Family Historian, Reunion, MacFamilyTree and Ancestris. Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gramps and RootsMagic exports were still 5.5.1 at last check. There is a separate guide with a table.

Does it matter?

Mostly no. Programs handle it. The two places it matters: for photos to travel with the file, look for GEDZIP support. And for an old file with encoding problems, re-exporting as GEDCOM 7 (which forces UTF-8) is one way to fix it for good.

Next

Look at the header of the file. The GEDC VERS line says which version it is. If it says 5.5.1, that is the majority.