Gedcom stands for GEnealogical Data COMMunication and is your best friend if you want to switch from one genealogy program to another. Every genealogy program organizes all the information you enter in its own way, but fortunately there is a standard that all genealogy programs understand, namely Gedcom.
Extracting and identifying information
Gedcom extracts the information contained in a genealogy program and organizes it in such a way that all other genealogy programs will also understand what are names, birth dates, children, source references and so on.
As with FamilySearch, we also have the Mormons of Utah in Salt Lake City, USA to thank for the Gedcom files. They chose to develop Gedcom in 1984 long before the internet and a wider range of genealogy programs were in the minds of genealogists.
Multiple versions GEDCOM
There are several versions of the Gedcom standard, but only versions 3.0, 4.0 (launched in 1989) and 5.5 (launched in 1999) are considered official. The others are so-called «draft versions» that can cause problems when the information stored in a genealogy program is to be transferred to the next genealogy program.
Brother’s Keeper, TNG, Legacy 7.5 and Legacy 8 all use the Gedcom 5.5 standard, but if you’re using a lesser-used genealogy program, it’s worth finding out whether the program uses one of the official standards or a draft version before you really wish they used one of the official standards.
This is what Gedcom (.ged) looks like:
If you open a gedcom file in a simple word processor like notepad, you can see what it actually looks like. For the average genealogist, something is understandable, we can see name year of birth and place. We also see that there are source references, but not what (2 SOUR @S47@), but if you scroll a little further down in the file you see that @S47@ is a reference to «Borge Torsnes ministerialbok #II3 1878-1902». If you spend a little time, you can read what it says in the gedcom file in the same way as a genealogy program, except that it is much more efficient to load it into a genealogy program that does the same job in seconds.
Sources:
Stoa, Nils Johan and Lars-Jørgen Sandberg (2012) – Våre røtter : slektsgransking som hobby: Cappelen Damm
https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM
