You Have a GEDCOM File. Now What?

You spent months, maybe years, building your family tree. Then you exported it, and your computer handed you a file called something like smith_family.ged. You double-click it and get a wall of text that looks like this:

0 @I12@ INDI
1 NAME Mary Ellen /Whitcomb/
1 BIRT
2 DATE 14 MAR 1897

That's a GEDCOM. It's the standard way family trees move between programs, and it's been around since 1984. It is also, to a human being, completely unreadable — which is why so many people finish their research and stall right here.

Here's the good news: that ugly file is the skeleton of a book.

What's actually in it

A GEDCOM holds the facts you gathered: names, birth and death dates, places, marriages, and how everyone connects. Depending on where you exported it from, it may also carry notes, sources, and links to photos.

What it does not hold is a single sentence anyone would want to read. No stories. No voices. No sense of what it was like to be Mary Ellen Whitcomb in 1897.

That gap is the whole problem, and naming it honestly is the first step. You don't have a book yet. You have the frame of one.

Why "just print the tree" disappoints people

Most genealogy programs will generate a report from your GEDCOM — a descendant chart, a pedigree, a book-shaped PDF listing every person with their dates.

Families almost never read them. They're reference documents, and reference documents sit on shelves. The tree tells you that Mary Ellen was born in 1897 and buried four children. It never tells you what that meant.

Step 1: Stop trying to include everyone

Your GEDCOM might hold 400 people. A book about 400 people is a directory.

Pick three to six. The ones your family already tells stories about, or the ones whose records made you stop and stare. One well-told life fills forty pages. You can always write volume two.

Step 2: Let the file give you the spine

For each person you picked, pull what the GEDCOM already knows — born here, married at nineteen, moved twice, outlived two children, died in a town forty miles from where they started.

Laid out in order, that's already a life with a shape to it. You'll see the hard decade. You'll see the move nobody in the family ever explained.

Step 3: Add the history around them

Find out what was happening in the places and years your people lived through. A man who left a farm in 1932 wasn't restless — he was living through something. The context turns a date into a reason, and most of it is a library search away.

Step 4: Add your family's own memories

Ask your living relatives about the people they actually knew. The sayings, the arguments, the way she kept everyone's birthdays taped inside the cupboard door. This is the part no archive holds and no software can invent, and it's the part your family will read twice.

That's your job, and it's the only part that genuinely needs you.

Step 5: The writing

This is where most family history projects quietly end — at a folder of notes and a blank page.

You can write it yourself, and some people love that. Or you can hand the gathering over and let it be written for you.

Legacy Trek takes the GEDCOM directly. You upload the file, it reads your tree and shows it to you as actual people rather than tag codes, and you choose which ancestors belong in the book. It asks you what you know about them, in plain questions. Then it writes the chapters — and every line stays yours to edit.

The research stays your work. The blank page stops being your problem.

The file isn't the finish line

Exporting a GEDCOM feels like completing something, and then it sits in a folder because nobody knows what the next step is.

The next step is choosing a few people and telling their stories properly — so that the work you did gets read at a kitchen table instead of living in a file format from 1984.

If you're ready to start, Roots Chronicles will take it from your export to a finished book. And if you're still gathering, our guide to writing a family history book walks through the whole process from the beginning.

Common questions

What is a GEDCOM file?

GEDCOM is the standard file format for moving family trees between genealogy programs, in use since 1984. A .ged file holds names, dates, places, marriages and relationships as plain text tags — which is exactly why it looks unreadable when you open it directly.

How do I open a GEDCOM file and actually read it?

You need software that renders it. Opening a .ged in a text editor shows you raw tag codes. Any genealogy program will display it as a tree, and Legacy Trek reads it and shows your ancestors as a plain list of people you can choose from.

Can I turn a GEDCOM into a book automatically?

You can generate a report from one, and most genealogy programs will do that — but the result is a reference document of names and dates rather than something anyone reads for pleasure. Readable chapters need the stories and historical context the file simply doesn't contain.

What's missing from a GEDCOM that a book needs?

Everything a reader cares about. The file holds facts. It holds no stories, no personality, no context, and nothing about what any of it meant. Closing that gap is writing the book.

How many ancestors should be in a family history book?

Three to six is a scope most families actually finish. A single remarkable life can carry a whole book, and a focused book full of real stories gets read far more often than a complete directory of the entire tree.