Comments on: A Plethora of Extra GEDCOM Tags

By: Louis Kessler

Louis Kessler — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 06:07:39 +0000

mtibesar: That’s an interesting question, and I don’t have a good answer for you … because I tend to only notice the bad ones during my testing, and not the good ones. I do know I have notes and comments in my program source for some problems that I’ve noted, and they include: Ancestral Quest, Brother’s Keeper, Family Origins, FTM, Generations, Legacy and PAF. Then there’s the mistake programs make with the CONC tag which is horrid! See “CONC Me On The Head”: http://www.beholdgenealogy.com/blog/?p=739

I do plan to in my Version 1.1 to store my database and export to (and ONLY export to) valid GEDCOM 5.5.1 which is the de facto standard. So Behold should be able to be the tool to bring all your GEDCOMs up to date in a manner that you can be confident can be read by any program that can properly read GEDCOM 5.5.1. But don’t ask me how many of them do that properly, because I don’t know that.

By: mtibesar

mtibesar — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 05:16:59 +0000

I would be interested to see your “Top Ten List of best GedCom Programs” that rate genealogy programs from best to worst on how they follow the standard. Also, I will be very interested in your future program that makes “invalid” gedcoms valid. I don’t trust any of the genealogy programs nowdays since they all have proprietary formats and file extensions. The one thing I want to depend on is exporting and saving my database into a gedcom. I have copies of my gedcoms 20 years back. Thank you for sharing your views on the Gedcom standard - it IS important and this standard is often slighted by the independent software vendors.

By: genej

genej — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:18:49 +0000

“If Behold can’t read your GEDCOM, it’s likely no program can.” –

That is so great, Louis.–GJ