This is a short Saturday Spotlight, because it’s a straight-forward/no-frills program – it’s a genealogy utility (technically a GEDCOM utility) known as “GEDCOM-XY-Editor” for Windows, Mac, and Linux, written by Christopher Alan Mosher, and it does what it says – from the official description:
Lets you edit (x,y) coordinate positions of individuals in a GEDCOM file, graphically on a traditional drop-line chart.
The program has a genealogically oriented layout algorithm, to automatically arrange the individuals by family relationships.
It was last updated on March 24, 2024 (a minor bug fix release), and it’s a good example of what I’d like the spotlight features to be – software that is very useful but does not have the name recognition that large programs do.
You can download it here: GitHub – cmosher01/Gedcom-XY-Editor
The release page: Release 2.3.0 · cmosher01/Gedcom-XY-Editor · GitHub
It can export the chart it creates as a PDF or SVG file if you’d like to work on it further (or incorporate it into a document), and it also has what the author calls a “skeleton” export for merging into another GEDCOM file. Note: The export has “minimal identifying information for individuals” – the information you see in the screenshot is what you will most likely get.
Speaking of screenshots, below is a scaled down version, but you can view the full version in all its glory on GitHub: gedcom-xy-editor-screenshot.jpg (3848×2002)
