A .ged file arrives — attached to an email from a cousin, sitting in a folder from a relative who has since died, or downloaded from a service you just cancelled. You double-click it. Nothing happens, or your computer offers to open it in something absurd.
The file is fine. It's the most durable format in genealogy. You just need something that reads it, and the right answer depends on what you're trying to do with it.
First, what you're holding
GEDCOM is a plain-text format. Not a database, not a proprietary blob — text, which is precisely why it has outlived nearly every program that ever wrote one.
Open one in a text editor and it looks like this:
0 @I1@ INDI
1 NAME John Andrew /Whitfield/
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 12 MAR 1878
2 PLAC Clare, County Clare, Ireland
1 DEAT
2 DATE 4 NOV 1951
2 PLAC Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States
1 FAMS @F1@
Each line has a level number, a tag, and a value. INDI is an individual, FAM is a family, BIRT is a birth. Records reference each other by those @I1@-style pointers. That's essentially the whole design.
Two things follow from this that catch people out.
Photos are not inside the file. GEDCOM stores file paths to images, not the images themselves. If the file came from someone else's computer, those paths point at folders that don't exist on yours. The names and dates transfer perfectly; the pictures need to be sent separately.
Not every GEDCOM is the same GEDCOM. Version 5.5.1 has been the working standard for decades; version 7.0 arrived more recently and isn't universally supported yet. Programs also add their own custom tags for things the standard never covered, and those get dropped in transit. Expect to lose some notes and program-specific fields when moving between applications. Names, dates, places, and relationships survive.
Option 1: Free desktop software
The most capable route, and it costs nothing.
Gramps is free and open source, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and reads GEDCOM properly. It's the most powerful thing on this list and the least friendly — the interface is dense and clearly built by people who use it daily. If you want to work with the data, this is the answer.
RootsMagic Essentials is the free tier of a well-established commercial program, and it's considerably gentler than Gramps. It'll open the file, show you charts, and let you explore.
Family Tree Maker and Legacy Family Tree both import GEDCOM cleanly. Legacy has a free edition; Family Tree Maker doesn't.
Use one of these when the file is something you intend to research, extend, or verify. More on getting files back out again.
Option 2: Upload it to an online tree service
Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, and FamilySearch all accept GEDCOM uploads.
The appeal is that once it's in, you get record hints against the service's collections, which can extend the tree considerably.
Three cautions.
Uploading a tree to a commercial service typically makes it discoverable by other users at some level, depending on the service and your settings. If the file contains living relatives, read the privacy settings before you upload, not after.
Merging into FamilySearch's shared tree is not a simple import. That tree is collaborative and single-copy, so adding your data means reconciling it person by person against profiles that may already exist. It's a genuine project, not a button. More on how that tree works.
And you're placing the file inside a subscription. If the sub lapses, access to the enriched version generally goes with it. Keep your original .ged somewhere safe regardless.
Option 3: Browser-based viewers
Several sites let you drop a GEDCOM in and view it immediately without an account. Convenient for a quick look at what's actually in a file.
Weigh it against the obvious: you're uploading a document containing names, birth dates, and places for your relatives, some of whom are alive, to a service you haven't evaluated. For a file of long-deceased ancestors, fine. For anything with living people in it, be more careful than the two-second convenience suggests.
webtrees is the serious version of this — free, open source, self-hosted, and genuinely excellent. It's the right answer if you want a private family website. It also requires a web server, PHP, and a database, so it's a weekend project rather than an afternoon.
Option 4: A text editor
Underrated. It's plain text — Notepad, TextEdit, or anything else will open it.
You won't get a chart, but you can immediately answer useful questions: is this file actually populated, how many INDI records are in it, does it contain living people, what program wrote it. The header at the top names the source program and the GEDCOM version. Thirty seconds of looking often saves an hour of installing.
Option 5: Put it on the television
Everything above is a research surface — built to help you interrogate data, and correspondingly dense. They're the right tools when you want to know whether a date is sourced.
They're the wrong tool entirely when what you want is to show your family to your family. Nobody has ever gathered relatives around a laptop running Gramps.
That's the gap Bright Branches fills. You upload the .ged file on the web, and it appears on your TV — as a fan chart, bow-tie pods, an organic tree, a grid, or a clock face. Movement is with the ordinary remote, and the chart reorients as you go so whoever you've landed on stays at the center. No on-screen buttons, no menus in the way. Apple TV, Google TV and Android TV, Fire TV, iPad, and the web viewer.
The tree is displayed, not edited — the .ged file remains the source of truth, and if you update it in your research program you upload the new version. That's deliberate. Editing belongs in the tool where you have your sources open; this is the other end of the process.
It's also, for a lot of people, the first time an inherited GEDCOM stops being a file and starts being a family. Someone spent years on that document. It deserves better than a folder.
Which one should you use
| If you want to... | Use |
|---|---|
| Check what's in the file, right now | A text editor |
| Research, verify, and extend it | Gramps or RootsMagic |
| Get record hints against big collections | An online tree service |
| Build a private family website | webtrees |
| Show it to relatives in your living room | A TV app |
| Hang it on the wall | Print a chart |
One rule regardless of which you pick: keep the original .ged untouched somewhere backed up. Every program on this list will happily import it, and some will happily alter it. That file may be the only copy of work someone spent a decade on, and it's a few hundred kilobytes. Put a copy somewhere you won't lose it before you do anything else.
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