GEDCOM to TXT — read a family tree as plain text
Convert a GEDCOM (.ged) file into readable plain text: every person in alphabetical order with their events, parents, marriages and children. In your browser, nothing uploaded.
About this conversion
The .ged file is text already, but text written for programs: levels, tags and pointers like “1 FAMS @F12@”. This turns it into text written for people — each person under their name, alphabetically by surname, with birth, death and other events, the names of their parents, every marriage and the children of it, and the notes. Good for printing a quick list, searching in any editor, or pasting into an email.
What the text looks like
The same made-up family as plain text, exactly as this page writes it:
Margaret Ellis (F)
Birth: 1874, York, England
Married: Thomas Hartley — 1897, Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Children: Alice Hartley
Alice Hartley (F)
Birth: 4 Jun 1899, Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Parents: Thomas Hartley and Margaret Ellis
Thomas Hartley (M)
Birth: 12 Mar 1871, Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Death: about 1932
Married: Margaret Ellis — 1897, Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Children: Alice HartleyWhat it is good for
Reading a tree without any genealogy program: on a phone, in an email to a relative, or printed for someone who will never open a .ged file. Any text editor finds a person, a place or a year in it at once.
How it is ordered
Alphabetically by surname, then by given name. Each person shows birth, death and other events with dates and places, the names of the parents, every marriage with its date and place, and the children of each marriage underneath it. GEDCOM dates are written out in words — “ABT 1932” becomes “about 1932”.
Just want to look inside it?
The same tool without converting anything: open the file and read it.
The same tree, other ways
The tree stays open after it is read, so the format is picked at the end: the same file can leave here as PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, HTML, JSON, PNG, JPG, XML or SVG. Before that you can walk through it person by person, print it as a chart or a book, find people who were entered twice, hide the living, and correct names and dates.