Tag: gedcom

To get a better feeling of the differences between GEDCOM 5.5.1 and the first release candidate of GEDCOM 7.0, the grammar of both versions (5.5.1 and 7.0) are shown in the table below side-by-side. A similar comparison is available for 5.5.1 vs 5.5.5. Please review the specifications to find more differences, this post just focusses…

GED-inline is an online GEDCOM validator. It has been around since 2011. Just upload your GEDCOM to the service and get an instant report. Now, developer Nigel Munro Parker has open-sourced the validation component. It’s available at Github via https://github.com/nigel-parker/gedinline This makes validating GEDCOM files even more accessible for developers. Generated by CFTREE Submitted by…

Now that the grammar of GEDCOM 5.5.5 is available in plain-text, a comparison with GEDCOM 5.5.1 is now also possible. Inspired by Kevin Routley’s GEDCOM Grammars : 5.5 vs 5.5.1 comparison, I’ve put the current GEDCOM version next to its predecessor. The following color-coding is used in the comparison table:     5.5.1 construct not…

Twenty years after the release of GEDCOM 5.5.1, version 5.5.5 was released. It’s just a relative small revision, but still, some progress as last. Adoption of GEDCOM 5.5.5 – which is now the current version – is not promoted by the way the specification is distributed: in a ZIP-ed PDF document on the newly revived…

Dates in GEDCOM files can be prepended with a “Date Escape” which defines the calendar notation of the date. The specification lists 6 Data Escapes: @#DGREGORIAN@ – The Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, is internationally the most widely used civil calendar. When no Date Escape is used, the Gregorian…

The GEDCOM parser of Genealogie Online needed a rewrite. The code base had grown out of proportion, resulting in inefficient code and cumbersome maintenance. A big difference between the start of coding the GEDCOM parser and now is the number of GEDCOM files available: nearly 7 thousand. This gave me the opportunity to do some…

The GEDCOM 5.5 standard is described in a PDF document prepared by the Family History Department of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dated 2 January 1996 (which in two days is 19 years ago). When you Google for the GEDCOM 5.5 grammar you usually end up on the HTML version by…

One can daydream about the ideal genealogical search engine for an archive. After this, you could e-mail your suggestions and wait until the archive (or their software supplier) to see the light and get the budget, you could complain, or just let it rest. Or you just take the challenge yourself. Based on a list…

When we buy 1 liter of milk we expect 1 liter of milk, because there are clear agreements about what 1 liter is. It’s a well documented standard. This way a producer knows how much to put in and a consumer knows how much he/she gets, no confusion. If you go abroad, a liter stays…

Genealogical data contain a lot of place names. These place names sometimes get misspelled or noted incompletely which often means the original place can’t be uniquely identified any more. Time for some attention to the quality of place names in genealogical publications! Unambiguously determining the place name Let’s say one of your ancestors died in…