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Genealogical Exchange Database (GEDCom)

Most people who study family history (or genealogy) will create a database of their findings. Organized with Individuals linked into Families. Other key entries are Sources of Facts and Events about these people and families, Repositories that contain those Sources, and more unstructured items like the Dates and Places where the Facts and Events occurred also exist. Media has been an adhoc addition. From such a database, a genealogical tree can be extracted by looking back in time from an Individual or Family at Ancestors or forward at descendants. To aid in exchanging these databases between genealogists and tools, the GEDCom format (for Genealogical Data Communication) was established by the Mormon church for its early PC software and internal one-tree. it is an exchange file format for these genealogical databases. Much of what genealogy tools accept and structure is dictated by what this file format can accept and represent.

The GEDCom format was last updated by what is now the FamilySearch group in the mid-1990's. Back when the majority of the tools were non-windows, alphabetic character only programs with no graphics. Pre-photo and document scanning and capture as well. Hence, it is woefully out of date for todays needs and uses. Many false starts exist at trying to update the standard by others outside the FamilySearch group have come and gone. The latest rendition is GEDComX.

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