GEDCOM for African family trees: what it carries, and what it loses
· 7 min read
GEDCOM is the long-standing interchange format for genealogical data, and it is the only realistic way to move a family tree from one program to another, or to keep a copy that outlives any particular piece of software. If your tree matters, you should be able to export it as GEDCOM.
But GEDCOM was designed around a European and North American model of the family, and it shows. Used carelessly on an African family tree, it will happily export the tree and quietly discard the parts that made it African.
What GEDCOM carries well
The core of a tree transfers reliably: individuals, their names, birth, marriage and death events with dates and places, and the parent-child and spouse links between them. Sources and notes transfer too. A tree made only of these will survive a round trip through GEDCOM essentially intact.
What it does not understand
The trouble is that the core was never the whole story. GEDCOM has no standard way to represent:
- Matrilineal clan membership, such as the Akan abusua, which is a lineage in its own right and not a property of an individual.
- The distinction between a lineage father and a biological father, as in Zulu ukugena arrangements.
- Bridewealth and the lineage-to-lineage marriage contract it seals.
- Multiple name types with distinct meanings, such as the Yoruba personal name, oríkì, orílẹ̀ and cognomen.
- Polygynous household structure beyond the bare fact of multiple spouses.
- Tonal marks and diacritics, which are part of a name, when an older program strips non-ASCII characters.
Some of these can be forced into custom tags, and many programs do exactly that. The catch is that custom tags are not standard, so the receiving program may ignore them, mangle them, or drop them without warning.
Where the loss actually happens
This is why a tree should be validated after every import, not assumed correct. Count the people, then spot-check the relationships that were hardest to represent: the clan memberships, the lineage fathers, the name types. Those are the ones that go missing.
How to protect the tree
- Treat GEDCOM as a backup and a transfer format, not as the master copy. Keep the working tree in a system that understands your lineage structure.
- Before importing into a new program, import into a test copy first and check what survived.
- Record lineage-critical facts redundantly: put the abusua or the orílẹ̀ in a standard note field as well as in any custom field, so it survives even where the custom field does not.
- Keep diacritics, and check that the receiving program preserves them rather than converting names to plain ASCII.
- Export periodically and keep dated copies. A tree you cannot reconstruct is a tree you will eventually lose.
None of this is a reason to avoid GEDCOM. It is the only bridge between programs, and a family history that cannot cross that bridge is hostage to whichever program it happens to live in. It is a reason to cross the bridge with your eyes open, knowing which parts of the load are lashed down and which are not.