FamilySearch GEDCOM, or simply GEDCOM (/ˈdʒɛdkɒm/ JED-kom, acronym of Genealogical Data Communication), is an open file format and the de facto standard specification for storing genealogical data.
This file contains genealogical information about individuals such as names, events, and relationships; metadata links these records together.
[6] However, its predecessor, GEDCOM 5.5.1, remains the industry's format standard for the exchange of genealogical data.
The family (FAM) record type is therefore the only source of links between the individuals (INDI) in the file, assigning parents (as HUSB and WIFE) and children (as CHIL) by referring to individuals' unique ID numbers.
[10] These historical origins are described in the 7.0 specification document: "The FAM record was originally structured to represent families where a male HUSB (husband or father) and female WIFE (wife or mother) produce CHIL (children).
"[11] Although the links in a GEDCOM family record still use the original naming indicating a husband and a wife, the specification now states that "sex, gender, titles, and roles of partners should not be inferred based on the partner that the HUSB or WIFE structure points to" and that these individuals within a family structure are collectively referred to as 'partners', 'parents' or 'spouses'.
Although it is possible to write a GEDCOM file by hand, the format was designed to be used with software and thus is not especially human-friendly.
[15] Findings showed that a number of problems existed and that "The most commonly found fault leading to data loss was the failure to read the NOTE tag at all the possible levels at which it may appear.
Its predecessor, GEDCOM 5.5.1 draft[20] was issued in 1999, introducing nine new attribute, tags and adding UTF-8 as an approved character encoding.
The draft was not formally approved, but its provisions were adopted in some part by a number of genealogy programs[21][22][23] including FamilySearch.org.
An example is the storage of East Asian names in their original Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, without which they could be ambiguous and of little use for genealogical or historical research.
Some genealogy programs, such as Gramps and The Master Genealogist, have elaborate database structures for sources that are used, among other things, to represent multi-person events.
When databases are exported from one of these programs to GEDCOM, these database structures cannot be represented in GEDCOM due to this limitation, with the result that the event or source information including all of the relevant citation reference information must be duplicated each place that it is used.
[60] The GEDCOM specification was made purposefully flexible to support many ways of encoding data, particularly in the area of sources.
In Aldfaer[62] for instance, the sequence depends on the ordering of the data by the user (alphabetical, chronological, reference, etc.).
The GEDCOM standard supports the inclusion of multimedia objects (for example, photos of individuals).
[67] In February 2012 at the RootsTech 2012 conference, FamilySearch outlined a major new project around genealogical standards called GEDCOM X, and invited collaboration.
[72] Commsoft, the authors of the Roots[73] series of genealogy software and Ultimate Family Tree, defined a version called Event-Oriented GEDCOM (also known as "Event GEDCOM" and originally called InterGED[74]),[75] which included events as first class (zero-level) items.
[citation needed] With Roots and Ultimate Family Tree no longer available, very few people today are using Event GEDCOM.
[77] One of the standards the organization proposed was Extended Legacy Format (ELF), compatible with GEDCOM 5.5(.1), but including an extensibility mechanism.