Is GEDCOM still relevant in today's online world? Part One

Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, N.M. (No. 11, Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian) Public Domain

Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery

GEDCOM is an acronym standing for Genealogical Data Communications. "GEDCOM" is copyrighted term and the copyright is owned by FamilySearch. It is an open, de facto specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogical software programs. For example, you can download an Ancestry.com family tree in the GEDCOM format. See "Uploading and Downloading Trees."

A GEDCOM file is in plain text. Here is an example of part of one of my downloaded GEDCOM files as it appears in Microsoft Word.

1 DEAT
2 DATE 7 MAY 1699
2 PLAC Aasted, Lindetsborg, Hjorring, Denmark
2 SOUR @S223@
1 BAPL
2 DATE 14 JUN 1910
2 SOUR @S223@
1 ENDL
2 DATE 17 JUN 1910
2 SOUR @S223@
1 FAMS @F247@
1 CHAN
2 DATE 6 DEC 2006
0 @I346@ INDI
1 _UID F2181814B06540AFBCE672FE58D7E56CCC01
1 NAME Jens /Egbertsen/
2 SOUR @S223@
1 SEX M
1 BAPL
2 DATE Submitted
2 SOUR @S223@
1 ENDL
2 DATE Submitted
2 SOUR @S223@
1 FAMS @F249@
1 CHAN
2 DATE 6 DEC 2006
0 @I347@ INDI
1 _UID DEAACB8DD4C745A4B124A8D3C7260731D96C
1 NAME Anne /Pedersen/
2 SOUR @S223@
1 SEX F
1 BAPL
2 DATE Submitted
2 SOUR @S223@

Despite the fact that this appears to be incomprehensible if you have access to the complete GEDCOM standard, in this case, GEDCOM Standard Release 5.5, with some study, you could decode all of this information into what would appear in software programs as entries for individuals in a family tree. The complete description of this particular file is 3,504 pages long in Microsoft Word and has 3,701,054 characters. You can find a copy of the GEDCOM Standard Release 5.5 from 2 January 1996 [Revised 10 January 1996] on RootsWeb.com. See http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~pmcbride/gedcom/55gctoc.htm

Also note the copyright: Copyright © 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This document may be copied for purposes of review or programming of genealogical software, provided this notice is included. All other rights reserved.

There was a draft revision of the GEDCOM Standard to Version 5.5.1 on 2 October 1999. The very first version of GEDCOM 1.0 was released back in 1984. I am not going to review the politics that propelled the GEDCOM Standard to become a de facto standard in this blog series but I am going to discuss some of the history and the relevance of the Standard today in light of the fact that FamilySearch, after a pause of ten years, released a final version of GEDCOM Version 5.5.1 on 15 November 2019. See The GEDCOM Standard Prepared by the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and once again, the copyright notice: Copyright © 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1999, 2019 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This document may be copied for purposes of review or programming of genealogical software, provided this notice is included. All other rights reserved.

It is important to understand that GEDCOM is not a "program" as such. It is a standard for sharing genealogical information between software programs both desktop-oriented and online. Here is a quote from The GEDCOM Standard, page 5 about the content of the Standard.

The GEDCOM Standard is a technical document written for computer programmers, system developers, and technically sophisticated users. It covers the following topics: 

! GEDCOM Data Representation Grammar (see Chapter 1 beginning on page 9)
! Lineage-Linked Grammar (see Chapter 2, beginning on page 19)
! Lineage-Linked GEDCOM Tags (see Appendix A, 83 and Chapter 2, beginning on page 19)
! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' temple codes (see Appendix B, page 96)
! ANSEL Character Codes (see Chapter 3, beginning on page 77, and Appendix C beginning on
page 97)

It is possible that this release was made as a response to a somewhat earlier release of a GEDCOM 5.5.5 Revision on 2 October 2019 by programmer and genealogist Tamura Jones. See "You waited 20 years, and there's nothing new." I wrote about this release in a post on 30 December 2019. See "New GEDCOM Version 5.5.5 Released" See also the following:

https://www.gedcom.org/

You may also wish to review the BetterGEDCOM wiki at https://archive.fhiso.org/BetterGEDCOM/HOME.html
and the Family History Information Standards Organisation, Inc. or FHISO.

Now, with that introduction, stay tuned for some of my own comments.