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Genealogy research advice

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  • Genealogy research advice

    My father did extensive genealogy research in the 90s and 2000s before his passing. After he passed away much of his computer files were lost/misplaced.
    Recently, I’ve located some of his files but don’t have any current genealogy software. I believe my father used Family Tree Maker as I found an old version (2005?) of FTM on an old PC computer.

    I’m currently a mac user and would like to get current software and try to reconstruct as much of my father’s work as possible. Among the files I’ve found are several .ged files. Does anyone know if these are data files that could be imported into FTM?

    I’m looking for ideas or advice on how to proceed? I’m not an experienced genealogy researcher. Thanks for your help!

  • #2
    Welcome to FTF!
    a ".ged" file is usually a gedcom file - it can be read by most genealogy applications. You could try downloading one of the freebies or trial versions and feed it a **copy** of the file(s) you've found.
    Here's a list of genealogy software apps


    More about gedcom:


    One other thought - you can upload your gedcom file(s) to wikitree.com - they'll read thru and list the people there. If you don't apporve the results of the upload, it will not permanently be put into wikitree.

    Good luck!
    Last edited by PhotoFamily; 07-06-17, 04:08.

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    • #3
      Make a copy of the ged file and only use the copy, just to prevent the original from harm.
      Look at the ged file in a text editor - a genuine ged is human-readable.
      Any I have seen have at the beginning a set of lines which make up a HEADer record which might tell you the software which was (last?) used to edit it.
      Such as... (this is not taken from a real case for privacy's sake)
      0 HEAD
      1 SOUR Family Tree Program
      2 VERS 7.33
      2 NAME Family Tree
      2 CORP My Private Computers plc
      2 DATE 28 Nov 2006
      2 TIME 19:14:34
      It should be that any commercial Genealogy software (including wikitree and other cloud-based stuff) will make some sense of a GEDCOM, although unrecognised fields may simply be ignored.

      GEDCOM is an attempt to offer a way of communicating data between databases, but regrettably, the GEDCOM standards are not consistently applied and the same information may be presented in different ways.

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