GEDCOM

GEDCOM stands for Genealogical Data Communications and is a file format specification developed by the Family and Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It allows different genealogical software programs to share data with each other.

GEDCOM References

• GEDCOM From Wikipedia
• GEDCOM 5.5 (Envoy, pdf, html)
• Gedcom.pm
• GEDCOM 5.5.1 draft (pdf)
• GEDCOM 6.0 beta (pdf) - Note - this effort appears to have been abandoned

GEDCOM Testing

• Gedcom.pm
• gedchk (perl), gedchk.exe
• GEDitCOM "Torture Test" files
• ANSEL and Unicode GEDCOM sample files
• Calico Pie's GEDCOM Coverage Test

Converting ANSEL to Unicode and back

• GRAMPS exports and imports ANSEL GEDCOM, but not all codes are supported. Test the output on the character ? which is used if a character is not understood
• Perl MARC::Charset module: Available on cpan, and well supported . Can convert MARC8 to Unicode and back. As ANSEL is a subset of MARC8 (consisting of the (extended) latin characters) it will convert all ANSEL GEDCOMS to Unicode. (:arrow:) More info, and a script that can convert: see the attachment to bug 831.
• marc4j - Java implementation of a convertor, also MARC8 to Unicode. Unclear if it converts correctly combined unicode characters.

ANSEL/MARC References

• ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993(R2002)
• Library of Congress, MARC specification tables
• MARC proposal 2006-09, Lossless technique for conversion of Unicode to MARC-8
• MARC proposal 2006-04, Technique for conversion of Unicode to MARC-8

Unofficial ANSEL to Unicode conversion lists

These cover the original ANSEL spec, now preseded by MARC8.

• ANSEL to Unicode by Thomas Berger
• ANSEL to Unicode by Heiner Eichmann
• Latin Characters in Unicode and ANSEL

See also

• GRAMPS XML
• Import from another program
• Gramps and GEDCOM