What are “gedcom” files?
GEDCOM stands for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. The GEDCOM file is a format developed by the projects and planning division in the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to meet their genealogical data communication needs, and the needs of other institutions wishing to exchange data with the Family History Department. GEDCOM has evolved into a de facto standard supported by most genealogy software companies and developers for the exchange of genealogy information between different computers, systems, and programs. There are several versions of the GEDCOM standard, however, and some programs won’t handle older or newer versions properly. If you are familiar with ASCII files for word processing or dbf files for databases you will understand gedcom files. If not, then consider that in the word processing business many companies were selling word processing programs using different formats, i.e. they did things differently from each other. So if you
