Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your GED file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert GED to another file type
To convert GED family trees to another format, you need Ancestry or other Data software.
Convert a file to GED
To convert other file formats to the "Genealogy Data File" file type, you need software like Ancestry or a similar tool.
About GED files
A .GED file is a plain text file built on the GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication) standard, used exclusively to save, transfer, and exchange family tree data. It stores metadata such as names, birth dates, relationships, and marriage details. Originally created by the LDS Church, it remains the universal standard for genealogy. Software platforms like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and RootsMagic rely on this format to import and export user data. More historical context is available on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM). Despite being a standard, the .GED format has significant disadvantages. It is extremely clunky because it is just raw text formatted with specific structural tags. Reading it manually is nearly impossible for an average user without specialized desktop software or an active subscription to a genealogy website. Furthermore, the GEDCOM format does not embed multimedia files; photos and scanned documents are merely linked as local file paths, which break easily when moving the file. Modern UTF-8 encoding is also sometimes mishandled by legacy genealogy apps, leading to corrupted characters in foreign names. To make this data useful, you must convert it. For sharing with relatives or long-term archiving, convert .GED to PDF or HTML. For data analysis, sorting, and editing, convert it to CSV or an Excel spreadsheet.
Convert.Guru analyzes your GED file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert GED file to PDF, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT or DB, you can use Ancestry or similar software from the "Genealogical Data Exchange" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to GED, try Ancestry or another comparable tool in the "Genealogical Data Exchange" category.
The GED Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our GED converter.