ged coms

[mudmonster]

How do these work and do you have to buy a program for it and how much and which one is best
Thanks
Ancestry is a little pricey at the moment
Mud

[RJ_Paton]

A gedcom file has become the standard manner by which genealogy programs can share information. Any of the currently available programs can import a gedcom file.

As to which program is best there are probably as many different opinions as there are programs 

There’s a couple of programs which are free to download and use . The commercially available ones vary in price and options offered

[confusion]

A gedcom file is a text file and can be opened in your favourite text editor.

Genealogy programs will open/import a gedcom file, the problem arises when the specific program
that exported it uses user defined tags; they are not recognised by all genealogy programs and will be ignored upon import into a genealogy program that does not recognise these specific tags.

User defined tags normally start with an underscore.

Hope this is understandable.

Jim

[mudmonster]

I downloaded two  tree's as gedcoms and then tried to open them with just a normal text reader
no such luck!

[Biggles50]

Roots Magic do a free version of their software, it is labelled as Essential and is a read only version of their current Roots Magic 9.

I would suggest making use of this free software to see how you like it.

Other software will import a Gedcom file so it is a case of finding one that you like.

It gets better as the full versions of both Roots Magic and Family Tree Maker will download your Ancestry Family Tree including all documents and media, this is something that a Gedcom does not do.

Both these are available for both a Windows PC and a Mac.

What you could do is buy one, download the tree and on Ancestry make your tree Private and cancel the subscription.  The tree will remain on Ancestry and when you want to renew the subscription you upload the software tree to Ancestry

[mudmonster]

Thanks again Biggles for the helpful information,getting to the end of my researching on ancestry some  missing people on there but mostly done.
mud

[KGarrad]

There are free Gedcom viewers available

A Google search on Gedcom viewers throws up a few.

[mudmonster]

As you can gather I am not completely at ease  with this computer tech! Does the Roots magic software just save your trees to the hard drive (private) or does it share with everybody(public)
Thanks
Mud

[KGarrad]

RootsMagic saves to your hard drive as you go.
Then on exiting the program you get an opportunity to save a back-up file. Which can only be opened by a Restore.