YourTrees
Guide to submitting a GEDCOM
The Do’s and Dont’s
Content Preparation
Protecting privacy, collaborating with a global audience and preparing your media files
This guide explains the recommended practices for ensuring your tree’s data is helpful to other members while protecting the privacy of living people. The standards are divided into required and recommended actions.
When you share your content in YourTrees, other members will be able to view it. That means you need to think about what the wider audience can see, whether they are entitled to see it and whether they can make sense of what they see.
- You must protect the privacy of living people – you are legally obligated.
- You ought to make your content accessible to a global audience who may not understand that for example “Salop” is an abbreviation for “Shropshire,” “PEI” is “Prince Edward Island,” “NSW” is “New South Wales” or “Ca” is “California.”
Our Terms of Use refer to data quality standards that are designed to facilitate these matters. They are set out in the tabs below.
When we import your GEDCOM file to YourTrees we pass it through a data validator that checks for and corrects many common errors. We will send you a report file detailing the changes we made so that you can manually update your local tree.
- Privacy
- Dates
- Abbreviations
- Places
- GEDCOMs
This section contains required standards that all users MUST apply to their family tree.
Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar legislation in other countries, the publication of information about living people is strictly controlled and you are legally obliged to take steps to protect that data.
There are two ways you can achieve this.
Omission
When you submit your GEDCOM files to us, you can simply omit people who are still alive. If this means you have to work back a few generations until you reach a generation where all are deceased, then that’s fine by us and you can submit as many GEDCOMs as you need for the branches involved. However, that can be a cumbersome process.
Suppression
The alternative way is to take advantage of a YourTrees feature, the “110 year rule” – if a record has a birth date less than 110 years from the date of submission of the GEDCOM, and no death date, the system will suppress that individual’s details to viewers. Naturally, for that to work you have to make sure the birth date is recorded and is correctly formatted as set out in the Dates section.
Doing nothing is not an option because of your responsibilities, as set out in the Terms of Use.
Please remember that if no birth date is entered, YourTrees will assume the person is deceased and make their record public.
Breaches of GDPR
As you will have seen when you submitted a GEDCOM, and in the Terms of Use, the responsibility for maintaining the privacy of living people is yours and we have explained how you can achieve that. If we receive any GDPR complaints we will refer them to you for action. We reserve the right to take corrective action if you fail to respond but we do not accept primary responsibility.
Private people
GDPR only protects living people. Once a death date is entered on a person’s record, YourTrees will make their record public.
There will be situations where publishing that record may be an issue due to sensitivities around recent bereavement. As a family historian you will want to record the fact without upsetting people. You can prevent publication by marking the record as “Private”. You can do this in your genealogy program and submit a fresh GEDCOM to us.
By default, YourTrees will mark as Private any one whose death date is less than 10 years from the submission date. Again, this is dependent on date fields being correctly populated with GEDCOM compliant dates.
This section contains required standards that all users MUST apply to their family tree.
YourTrees has some important date related features:
- The ability to calculate timelines, ages and life spans.
- The abilily to treat records as Living or Private if they meet the rules when a GEDCOM file is imported
Both features require that dates use the GEDCOM standard. Failure to do so may reveal the details of a living person.
GEDCOM dates use the format (D)D MON YYYY where:
- (D)D is a one or two digit number
- we don’t use ordinals such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th
- single digits can be entered with our without a leading zero, 1 or 01. We recommend using two digits because with 1 Jan 2021 there is always a lingering doubt that a digit might be missing, and 1 Jan is actually 10 – 19, 21 or 21 Jan
- MON is the first three letters of the English month name
- You can use sentence case “Jan” or uppercase “JAN”
- YYYY is a four digit year number – all four digits are required
There are some permissible qualifiers you can add to dates – see below for the most common – but apart from those you must not add any other information in the date field. For example, if you know the time of a birth, you must not add it here. Instead you should add it as a note to the birth event.
If you add anything else to the date field it will throw off the date calculations. We once saw someone who was calculated to be 1,847 years old when they died because the time of birth had been included in the date field.
Partial dates are acceptable e.g. Jun 1800 but don’t use a placeholder for any missing element e.g. ?? Jun 1800 – use a data qualifier instead (see below.)
British Quarter Dates
Some, but not all, genealogy programs can handle the British Quarter Dates found in BMD records. The GEDCOM standard does not, so these need to be converted to GEDCOM compatible date ranges. e.g. Q1 1870 = Bet 01 Jan 1870 and 31 Mar 1870 (see next section)
Date Qualifiers
There’s a range of date qualifiers you can apply to dates. These are the most common ones, that will handle > 90% of all rquirements..
| Qualifier to use | Meaning | Description | Needs a further qualifier |
| Abt | About | When you are fairly certain of the date to a year or two | |
| Est | Estimated | Similar to Abt but your guess is based on a fact of some kind. e.g you base someone’s marriage date on the birth of their first child | |
| Bef | Before | An event that is related to another. e.g. you have a burial date of 06 Feb 1700 but no record of when they died | |
| Aft | After | e.g. You know when they died but you don’t know when they were buried | |
| Bet | Between | To define a range. e.g. You know Mary was her mother’s first child, you know the date her mother was married, you know the date the second child was born, but you don’t know the date that Mary was born |
Bet needs “And” and a second date to create the range e.g. Bet 01 Jan 1700 and 30 Jun 1702 |
This section describes recommended practices that will foster collaboration with other users. You are not obliged to apply these guidelines but it will benefit the community if you do.
With the exception of titles (Rev, Dr etc) and post-nominals (MA, MSc etc) it’s good practice to avoid abbreviations, so that your records are more meaningful to users and are picked up by searches. If you have used them, especially in addresses, it would be better to expand them.
There are two other exceptions.
- “USA” is a universally recognised abbreviation and should be used in places
- “St” is a valid abbreviation for “Saint” (but not for “Street”)
Chapman codes
These should be avoided. They are a relic of the pre-internet, pre-personal computers age when they were a helpful way of categorising place records but as an outside user, unless you know that, for example, CON is a Chapman Code, you will struggle to find out what it is. And even if you know it’s a Chapman code, the abbreviations aren’t logical so you’ll need a lookup table.
Many British family historians aren’t even aware of their existence, even though they were originally devised to categorise British counties, so it’s extremely unlikely that anyone outside the UK will be aware of them.
The good news is that if you use them, when we import your GEDCOM we have a program that will scan your file and convert Chapman codes to the full text. This means you don’t have to abandon Chapman codes if you don’t want to, although it would save our volunteers’ time if you did.
This section describes recommended practices that will foster collaboration with other users. You are not obliged to apply these guidelines but it will benefit the community if you do.
Place names are the best example of the need to avoid abbreviations and probably the place where we use them most!
Addresses need to be entered in full including the full UK county/US State/Province name and the country. Elements should be separated by commas. Post/Zip codes are for the benefit of the local postal authorities and are not that useful in our context but there’s no harm including the ones you do have if you want to.
Specimens
250 Hemdean Road, Caversham, Reading, Berkshire, England
If there’s a housename but no number then:
“The Big House”, Hemdean Road, Caversham, Reading, Berkshire, England
and if the house is in a complex
“The Big House”, Regents Court, Hemdean Road, Caversham, Reading, Berkshire, England
The number of elements is flexible according to the need, as long as the elements are comma separated.
Do we really need the country?
Middlesex appears once in England, twice in the USA, once in Canada and twice in Australia. Berkshire fares better, only appearing twice in the USA. There are many Surreys. There’s a California near Wokingham, Berkshire, England, another near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England and a New York in North Tyneside, England (where the village post office does a brisk trade with American tourists who love getting souvenir mail franked with “New York, England.”) So, yes, we really do need the country.
The UK
In the case of Britain, it is most helpful to overseas members to use the national names instead of UK, which didn’t exist until the Act of Union, and may not always exist.
The USA
USA is a universally accepted term. There is no need to expand it.
Why full addresses are vital
Addresses are formatted in a system that’s called “little endian”, where smallest unit comes first and each element is bigger than the previous.
For the locals, the smallest end of the address is the most important. We don’t need all the other elements to be present because we can infer them. But the remote users will zoom in from the big end. “It’s in England, it’s in Berkshire etc.” That’s why a complete address is important, even if it takes a little longer to enter.
Historical Addresses
How should you enter an address that has changed over time because of boundary changes (hello Abingdon, Berkshire – or is that Oxfordshire?) or because the place has been demolished?
There’s no rule about this but the recommendation is to record the address contemporaneous with the event, and make a note against the address to record the modern equivalent. If you have events occuring either side of a boundary change (hello again Abingdon) then use the address relevant at the time of the event. YourTrees is able to handle these “duplicates.” Note though that using the address that was used at the time of the record doesn’t mean being absolutely faithful to the record. Remember the need for full addresses including country names?
Chapman codes
These should be avoided. They are a relic of the pre-internet, pre-personal computers age when they were a helpful way of categorising place records but as an outside user, unless you know that, for example, CON is a Chapman Code, you will struggle to find out what it is. And even if you know it’s a Chapman code, the abbreviations aren’t logical so you’ll need a lookup table.
Many British family historians aren’t even aware of their existence, even though they were originally devised to categorise British counties, so it’s extremely unlikely that anyone outside the UK will be aware of them.
The good news is that if you use them, when we import your GEDCOM we have a program that will scan your file and convert Chapman codes to the full text. This means you don’t have to abandon Chapman codes if you don’t want to, although it would save our volunteers’ time if you did.
Doesn’t storing similar addresses cause search issues?
It’s a general truth about searching that the more precise you are with your search term, the greater the number of valid results that you will exclude. Our old friend Abingdon, Berkshire will be excluded if you search for Abingdon, Oxfordshire but both will be included if you search for Abingdon.
If our trees are really faithful to the record then on Richard Blome’s map of 1671, Abingdon was Abbington. That’s why the best way to search for place names in YourTrees is not to enter a place name but to drill down through the Place List, which will connect you with useful results in seconds.
You can update your online tree(s) by submitting updated GEDCOM files. These should be in GEDCOM 5.5 format and preferably 5.5.1 as this has the greatest compatability across all platforms. If your family tree app hasn’t been updated recently it may not support 5.5.1 and may need an update. Look for a menu prompt along the lines of Help > Check for updates. Older formats may still work but might produce unexpected results.
You may submit GEDCOMs as often as you want but please bear in mind we are staffed entirely by part-time volunteers who give up their time to do this. You’ll understand that we reserve the right to impose a limit on individuals or across the board if we feel the frequency is impacting on our service to all members.
Beware
Different family tree programs generate subtly different versions of GEDCOM and individual users can use the data fields in different ways. So, after we’ve uploaded your new or updated GEDCOM file, it’s essential you check living and private people to make sure all is well. If it isn’t, email yourtrees.admin@berksfhs.org.uk for assistance. For our part, we may email you with recommendations on actions you should take to improve your data
Generating GEDCOMs from popular programs
When you export/download a GEDCOM file you are taking a snapshot copy of your family tree at a point in time. Your original file is unaffected and remains in place for you to continue to work on. Don’t forget to send us an update from time-to-time
Ancestry
To see a quick video of this process, click here
1 – 4 are self explanatory
5. Make sure you select Strict GEDCOM (5.5.1) because this is the best format to import to YourTrees
6. Select Add all (recommended) or select individuals
Warning! Family Historian has no explicit way to flag or suppress Living individuals. You must therefore ensure that their birth and death dates are in GEDCOM format so that YourTrees can flag them correctly during import.
7. Uncheck this field
8. Uncheck this field
9. Exclude media records. YourTrees does not support media, yet.
10. Press OK to save the GEDCOM file
You cannot download a GEDCOM file directly from FamilySearch. You have to sync FamilySearch with Rootsmagic and download it from there (see Rootsmagic entry below.)
1 – 2 are self explanatory and are followwed by a pop-up box where you give a name to the GEDCOM file
3. This is where you set the export options. Family Tree Builder has few options.
4. If your living people do not have birth dates in GEDCOM format, these are failsafe options to prevent the inclusion of living people in the GEDCOM. If you have birth dates in GEDCOM format, our system will mask living people. The choice is yours
There are some important steps to consider – see notes below
- Our system automatically privatizes living people using a 110 year rule but this is dependent on the birth and death dates in your file conforming to the GEDCOM format. If you are not certain they do, this is a good option to use
- Your choice
- Your choice
- Media files are not supported yet so please don’t include media links
- See 4
- It is not necessary to password protect your file. You will upload it directly to our secure server. You only need a password if you’re sending it by email, which you’re not
To see a quick video of this process, click here
1- 4 are all straightforward and there appear to be no privacy options
Legacy has one of the most comprehensive GEDCOM download processes
1 & 2 are straightforward
3. Select the option for GEDCOM 5.5.1 only
4. Select UTF-8 as the character set
5. Check these options to carry over any formatted notes
6. Select all records (recommended) or select individuals
7. Select the Privacy Options – Legacy has lots!
- If birth and death dates are in GEDCOM format, our system will automatically suppress details of living people
- But you have many options you can use to make sure that living people are not exposed. They are well explained by Legacy so there is no need for further explanation here
8. Press save to generate the file
1 -3 are straightforward
4. Make sure you choose the GEDCOM 5.5.1 option
5. Exclude Multimedia because YourTrees does not support that, yet
6. Include formatting with the Notes text
7. You could allow YourTrees to suppress the details of living people, if your dates are GEDCOM compliant. If not, select this option
8. Select this option if you have marked any records as private
9. Press to create the GEDCOM file
MyHeritage provide a full set of instructions in their FAQ
1 – 4 are self explanatory
5. If birth and death dates follow the GEDCOM format then you can leave the filtering of living people to YourTrees. If they are not or you have any concerns about privacy you should choose this option.
6. Media is not yet supported in YourTrees so please choose this option
7. GEDCOM 5.5.1 is the required format
8. UTF-8 is the required character set
9. Press to create the GEDCOM export
1-2. File > Export will open the dialogue box
3. You can choose the default option of Everyone or choose individuals
4. Uncheck this box – unless you are submitting media
5. Uncheck this box because you are not sending the file to another Rootsmagic installation
6. Check this box but at 7, choose Full name. YourTrees will apply it’s own rules regarding suppression of data. Do the birth and death dates in your file conform to the GEDCOM standard?
YourTrees
A Digital Legacy