GEDCOM to Word — a family history book you can edit
Turn a GEDCOM (.ged) file into a Word document written as a family history: generations as chapters, every person in sentences, children numbered, sources as notes and an index of names. In your browser.
About this conversion
Genealogy programs keep a tree as data; relatives want to read it. Here the .ged is turned into prose the way family history books are written: “John Smith was born on 3 March 1890 in Leeds, Yorkshire. He married Mary Brown on 12 June 1915…”. The book follows the descendants of the person you pick generation by generation, with every child numbered and a “+” on those whose line continues, or it follows the ancestors with the classic numbering where a father is twice his child's number. Sources become notes at the end, and an index of names closes the book. The Word file uses Word's own heading styles, so the table of contents and navigation work, and every sentence can be rewritten. Before sharing it outside the family, tick “Leave out living people”.
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, Excel (.xlsx), CSV, HTML, TXT, 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.
Questions
- Can I add my own stories?
- Yes — that is what the Word file is for. Write between the generated paragraphs, add photos and change the headings; it is an ordinary document.
- What about photos?
- If you open a GEDZIP (.gdz) export, or the .ged together with its photos folder, each person's photo is placed next to their entry and on the title page.
- Which people are left out?
- With “Leave out living people” on, anyone without a death who was born less than 110 years ago appears only as “Living”, with no dates or places. Turn it off for a private copy.