How to open a GEDCOM file without genealogy software

A cousin sends you an email with an attachment: family_tree.ged. Thirty years of work went into it, he says. You double click it and your computer asks which program you would like to open it with. You do not have one. That is the situation this article is about, and the good news is that you do not need to buy a program for it.

The short answer

A GEDCOM file is a text file with a fixed layout, the exchange format of genealogy programs. To see what is inside, all you need is a reader. There is one that works in your browser: you drag the file into the window, and you see how many people and families it contains, how many generations it spans, who the oldest known ancestor is and where the gaps are.

On thememorypalace.ai/gedcom you can do that for free and without an account. The file is read in your own browser and never leaves your device.

What is inside a GEDCOM file

If you open a .ged file in Notepad, you will see lines like these:

• 0 @I12@ INDI: the start of a person, with their own number.
• 1 NAME Maria /Peeters/: the name, with the surname between slashes.
• 1 BIRT and below it 2 DATE 14 MAR 1921 and 2 PLAC Lier: birth, date and place.
• 0 @F4@ FAM: a family, with references to husband, wife and children.

Every person, every family and every source is described this way, line by line. For a computer that is perfectly clear. For a person, a file of five hundred people is impossible to read like this. That is why a reader helps: it turns the lines into an overview.

What you learn when you open the file

What the reader shows	Why it is useful
Number of people and families	You know how big the work is that you have been given.
Number of generations	You see how far back the family tree reaches.
The oldest known ancestor	Often the start of a conversation at the table.
The gaps	People without parents, without a date or without a place: that is where the search can continue.

Those gaps are the most interesting part. A family tree is never finished. When you know where a branch stops, you also know which question to ask an elderly aunt, or which parish register to search next.

What is not inside

A GEDCOM file contains no photos, no scans of certificates and no recordings. Sometimes there is a reference to a file, such as C:\FamilyTree\photo_grandpa.jpg, but that reference only works on the computer of whoever made the family tree. So ask for the photos separately, ideally in the same folder with clear file names.

Carrying on with the family tree

If you want to add to it yourself, import the file into any genealogy program or family tree website you like. Almost every program reads GEDCOM, because that is what the format was made for. Watch for two things when importing: characters such as é and ë do not always come through correctly in older files, and an import usually creates a new family tree rather than updating an existing one.

Keep the original file unchanged, the way you keep the master of a scan. Work on a copy.

From names to people

A family tree tells you who descends from whom. What it rarely tells you is who those people were. Maria Peeters, born in Lier in 1921, is one line in the file. For her grandchildren she only becomes someone with a photo, a story about the war, a recipe. If you want to bring those two together, the family tree and the photos and stories, you can do that in The Memory Palace: the family tree comes in as GEDCOM, and it goes back out as GEDCOM too.