A Word About GEDCOMS

As you will quickly come to realize, the “In Search of Our Acadian Roots” CD contains over 400,000 GEDCOMs and that, together with the fact that Family Tree Maker is probably the most popular genealogy program on the market, makes it logical for me to provide you additional information on both.

GEDCOM is a standard file format for exchanging information between genealogy programs. The acronym GEDCOM stands for Genealogical Data Communications. The Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) developed the GEDCOM standard and it is used by most popular Genealogy Software Programs.

Once you’ve used the CD’s built-in software to compare your own data against the entire database of the CD and (using letter “N” of the Main Menu) created a “match file”, you’ll want to view those GEDCOMS which “matched” with your own data. As indicated previously, the best way to do this is to import the GEDCOM into your own genealogy program which, for the sake of explanation, I will assume is Family Tree Maker.

The Acadian CD is NOT encrypted and thus, you can use the GEDCOM feature of Family Tree Maker (or any other genealogy program which supports GEDCOM) to transfer information from the CD into Family Tree Maker. By using GEDCOM, you can avoid having to retype all of your family information.

Note: You can also use GEDCOM to share data that you have prepared with a fellow Genealogist. There are many genealogists on the Internet that have prepared GEDCOM files of their data and they make it available publicly to other researchers. As you can imagine, this method of sharing is the ultimate way to obtain information, since you do not have to manually enter each piece of information.

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