Family Tree Maker (GEDCOM 7 Import and Export, Printable Charts)

About the Family Tree Maker (GEDCOM 7 Import and Export, Printable Charts)

Build your family tree in the browser: people with their names, dates, places, photos, notes and other events, linked as parents, partners and children. See it as a pedigree (ancestors), a descendant chart, a fan chart or a vanshavali — the Indian lineage register, generation by generation, with the family’s gotra, native place and kuldevi in its header.

Open a GEDCOM file exported from another family tree program — GEDCOM 7, or the older 5.5.1 that many programs write, including its ANSEL text — and keep your tree as a GEDCOM 7 file, or as a GEDZIP with the photos inside. Nothing is uploaded: the tree is kept in this browser and in the files you save. A Pro pass unlocks the print-ready PDF of a chart on one page, or as a large poster tiled across ordinary sheets for a home printer; the free preview shows the chart on screen and the first pages of the PDF, watermarked.

Common uses

• A printed tree for a family reunion, a wedding or a grandparent’s birthday.
• A vanshavali for a family puja, a pilgrimage record or the next generation.
• Moving a tree from one family tree program to another through GEDCOM.
• A school project on family history, with photos and a fan chart.

The four charts

• Pedigree: the starting person and their ancestors, two parents per person, up to 10 generations. Turn on Empty boxes for a fill-in chart with room for the ancestors you do not know yet, and Ahnentafel numbers to number them the genealogists’ way (father 2, mother 3, father’s father 4 …).
• Descendants: a person, their spouses or partners and all their descendants, row by row; children of a later marriage hang from that couple.
• Fan: ancestors in rings around the starting person, as a half circle, three quarters or a full circle; names follow the rings near the centre and the spokes further out.
• Vanshavali: the descendants of a founder, numbered by generation. By default it follows the male line, as many traditional registers do: sons’ families continue, daughters are shown with their husbands’ names, wives with their own family’s name. Add Gotra, Native place, Kuldevi and Kuldevta to the founder as facts to fill the header, and switch the labels to Hindi.

GEDCOM files

GEDCOM is the file format family tree programs use to exchange trees. This tool writes GEDCOM 7.0 and reads 7.0 and the older 5.5.1, 5.5.5 and 5.5 files, in UTF-8, UTF-16, ANSEL or Windows-1252 text.

It keeps people (names, married names, nicknames, sex), births, deaths and more than thirty other events and facts with their dates and places, notes, families with marriages and divorces, children with their relationship (birth, adopted, foster) and one photo per person. What it does not edit — sources and citations, repositories, Latter-day Saint ordinances, ages and times of day at events, map coordinates of places and other programs’ own extension tags — is counted in the report after opening and left out, so do not use a saved file to replace a research file that has sources in it. A child link the file marks as disproven is left out too.

A GEDZIP (.gdz) is a zip of the GEDCOM file and its photos, as GEDCOM 7 describes it; a plain .ged file has no photos in it.

Living people stay private

A person counts as living unless a death, burial, cremation or probate is recorded, you mark them as deceased, or their dates show they were born 110 or more years ago. A birth date with no upper limit, such as after 1900, does not show that. When the birth date does not settle it, the dates of their children and marriages are used, so a great-grandmother without dates still counts as deceased when her grandchildren were born long ago.

On charts and PDFs, living people show their names without dates or places by default, and their marriages without a year; the photos you add still show. You can show their dates, or replace them with “Living”, which hides their photos too. People you mark as private show their names only on charts, in PDFs and in copies to share. A copy to share saves a GEDCOM file in which living and private people keep only their names, sex and family links: no dates, places, events, notes, photos or record IDs. Identity numbers (ID and social security numbers) are left out for everyone.

Printing a poster at home

Choose the sheet size your printer takes and how many sheets across the poster should be; the number of rows follows from the chart’s shape, and the page shows the size the poster will be. Each sheet prints inside its margins, and neighbouring sheets repeat the same strip of the chart (the overlap). Print at actual size, trim the white margin off the left and top of each sheet (except the first column and row), lay it over its neighbour so the cut edge meets the dashed line, and tape or glue. The assembly map on the first page shows where each sheet goes.

Limitations

• There is no search of historical records, no matching with other people’s trees and no DNA testing — genealogy subscription services sell those.
• Sources, citations and other programs’ extension data are not kept when a file is opened; the report says how many were left out.
• The tree is kept in this browser, which can clear stored site data (in private windows, after clearing browsing data or when space is short). Save the tree file regularly and keep it.
• In the PDF, names in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese letters are real text; names in other scripts (Devanagari, Tamil, Arabic, Chinese and others) are sharp pictures of the text drawn by your browser, so they print well but cannot be searched or copied.
• GEDCOM has no way to say that a person is living, so a person you marked as living is worked out again from the dates when the file is opened later.
• One photo per person. HEIC photos open in Safari; in other browsers, convert them to JPEG first.
• Very large descendant charts become very wide; show fewer generations or start from someone closer.
• In a tree of more than 5,000 people, the chart’s From list and the relationship lists hold the first 5,000 people by surname and the person you have open; start a chart from anyone with Start the chart here in the Person tab.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.