Open a GEDCOM file and see who is in it GEDCOM
Everyone in a family tree file, with their dates, parents, partners and children, and the dates that cannot be right. Read in this tab; the file is not changed and not uploaded.
The family tree file
What is in it
Everybody in the file
| Name | Born | Died |
|---|
One person and their family
What does not add up
Dates that cannot all be true, and links that lead nowhere. Dates marked about, estimated or calculated are left out of the date checks: setting one guess against another proves nothing.
Take the list with you
Everybody as a spreadsheet, one row a person with their dates, places, parents and partners, or the list of things to check. Both open in Excel, Numbers and Sheets.
How it works
What it reads, and what it does not
GEDCOM is the file every family tree program can write, usually from a menu called Export, Download or Share. This reads GEDCOM 5.5, 5.5.1 and 7.0, in UTF-8, UTF-16, ANSEL or Windows-1252, and lists each person with their birth, christening, death and burial, their parents, brothers and sisters, partners and children.
The checks look for things that cannot be true: a death before a birth, a child born before a parent or after their mother died, a parent under twelve, a marriage before a birth or after a death, a life longer than any recorded, and links to people or families that are not in the file. A file with nothing to report is consistent, which is not the same as correct.
It does not change the file or write a new one. It does not show photographs or other media, merge duplicates, show notes and sources (it counts them), or look anybody up online. A GEDZIP (.gdz) has to be unzipped first, and the .ged inside it opened here.
Doing this often? OBSCURA Roots opens the same file to edit the tree, cite sources fact by fact, print charts and write a family history book, with the tree kept on your computer. On its own, US$2 a month; with everything else, US$5 a month or US$48 a year. 7 days free.