If you care at all about working with your genealogy data outside of your current software or service, or making sure that your data can be properly read by other genealogy programs (should your current program stop being supported or you feel the need to change programs), you should be reading the Modern Software Experience (TamuraJones.net), as it’s the best website out there discussing GEDCOM standards and how various genealogy software packages handle (or don’t handle) GEDCOM files.
If you are a developer, it’s definitely a website you should be reading.
Last week, he put out two new articles:
In the first article, he’s not talking about compatibility with different GEDCOM versions between different genealogy programs – instead it’s a discussion of the compatibility of various GEDCOM versions with each other. With the second article, it’s about the problems with legacy extensions and user-defined-tags, and both articles get into how GEDCOM 5.5.5 worked to solve the problems of the past. I personally did not seriously start using genealogy software until after GEDCOM 5.5 had been released, at which point, as Jones mentions, things were relatively stable. I missed out on a lot of the early problems with GEDCOM compatibility, but I’ve seen it when looking at older GEDCOM files from other people that I’ve come across.
To understand why it was that way – In the span of 7-8 years, from 1984-1991, GEDCOM 1.0 – 5.0 you had a proposed standard and then four major releases of the GEDCOM standard, that was doing something nobody had done before. During that time, MS-DOS-based PCs and Apple II’s (and Commodore 64!) dominated the consumer market (although Windows 3.x was coming into its own), and everything was floppy disk-based (and the amount of entries for a lot of genealogy programs was based on the size of your floppy disk storage).
You would think that with such a stable platform(s) the standard wouldn’t evolve as fast as it (relatively) did, but during that time you had Personal Ancestral File (PAF) being updated regularly (in some cases PAF was driving the GEDCOM changes), you had several Roots genealogy program releases from COMMSOFT for different platforms (starting with Heathkit computers), Family Tree Maker 1.0, AnArkiv (Swedish, released on DOS, C64), Brother’s Keeper 1.0, Reunion (Mac), Pedigree, Cumberland Family Tree 1.0, Family Origins 1.0 (the developer would later start RootsMagic) and several dozen other genealogy program releases that you have probably never heard of. It was a wild time for genealogy software and everybody was trying to figure out how best to serve the market when there were no past genealogy programs to look to for inspiration – up until the early 1980s, genealogy was done with paper & pen (or pencil).
But I digress! Tamura Jones gives us a deep dive on the GEDCOM compatibility programs and how it took 35 years before we had GEDCOM 5.5.5, in his words, “the most compatible new GEDCOM version ever.“
I do not understand: the current modern version of GEDCOM is 7.0.
Why dwell about an old fantasy version of GEDCOM?
S Beats is disinforming your readers. That self-named ‘GedCom 7.0’ is NOT GedCom, but a fantasy project, some individual’s ALTERNATIVE to GedCom with a very misleading name. GedWrong would be a much better name. Familysearch only supports the individual who created GedWrong with money because it brings back all the discrimination that GedCom 5.5.5 finally got rid off!