Exporting a family tree

Timescrolly can write the people you keep as entities as a GEDCOM file, the format genealogy programs use to hand over a family tree. Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, Gramps, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker and most other programs open it. It is the way back out of Importing a family tree, it is free on every plan, and it holds people, not images or timelines.

Where to export, and who can

You can ask for a GEDCOM file in three places:

• Your people. The Export your data page (Export data, under Export your data on the Account page's Details tab) has a Family tree (GEDCOM) section below the zip. On the Entities page, Export family tree takes you straight to it.
• A team's people. The team's export page (Export team data, on the team's Settings tab) has the same section, and on the Entities page's team tab Export family tree goes there.
• One timeline's family tree. In the viewer, choose Family tree (GEDCOM) under the Export button in the header. It shows when the timeline has people and you are signed in, but not in an embed. You can also choose Family tree (GEDCOM) on the timeline's Exports tab.

Exporting your own people needs a verified account. Exporting a team's people is for the team's owner and admins, as for the zip and as for importing. A timeline's family tree can be exported by anyone with a verified account who opens the timeline through their own account, a public timeline included. A share link alone is not enough.

Choose Request GEDCOM file. The file is built in the background, usually within a minute or two, and you get a notification when it is ready; a GEDCOM file is never emailed. Choose Download next to it under Recent exports on the same page. A timeline's Exports tab lists it with your booklets and posters. The file is named timescrolly-<your handle or the timeline's URL name>-<date>.ged.

What the file holds

The file holds people, and what the people carry:

• each person's name and other names, sex, birth and death (with the other dates kept for them), occupations and titles, other attributes as facts, identifiers, notes (the summary and the description, as text), sources with their citations, and residences, with coordinates when the place has them. Places are text on a residence, not records of their own;
• their families: marriages and divorces with their dates; birth, adoptive, foster and step parents; and siblings that no parent already implies;
• for each person a stable id, their "GEDCOM UID" identifier if they have one and their Timescrolly id if not.

The file of your people or of a team's holds everyone in them that you may see. A timeline's file holds the people of its family tree: the people its items link and their close relatives. Relations between people and organizations, groups, allies and the like are not written.

The file holds what you may see. If you can see more than a viewer can, tick Leave out what viewers can't see in the timeline's dialog to get the file an outsider would get; it is always on while you preview as a viewer. A viewer's file has no private or secret people and no secret relations. In a description, the mention of a secret person or a hidden item is removed; the mention of a person who is only private keeps its text. See Secrets and reveals.

What changes or is left out

GEDCOM can't hold all of Timescrolly, and some things change on the way:

• Names are written whole. There is no split into given name and surname, so a program may ask you to split them on its side.
• Items are not events. An event linked to a person is not a life event in the file. Events an earlier import turned into items come back only as the text of the person's description.
• Unmarried parents show in other programs as two one-parent families, because a couple without a marriage is not a family record. Timescrolly reads them back as the same two parents.
• Dates in other calendars. Hijri, Coptic, Ethiopian and Persian dates are written as the Gregorian date, with the original label in a phrase when the date is a single day. A date spanning a month or a year becomes a Gregorian range without its original label. Dates in the BP, AP and custom calendars are a phrase only, which another program won't place on a time scale.
• Times are dropped. Dates keep their day, month or year, not the time.
• Images and other media are not included.
• Other kinds of entity are not included: places, organizations, groups and the like, apart from the text of a residence.
• GEDCOM 7.0 isn't offered. 5.5.1 is what every program reads.

Opening the file in another program

In your genealogy program, look for Import or Open in the tree's menu and choose the .ged file. The file is GEDCOM 5.5.1, which all of the programs above read. Because every person carries their id, a program that keeps it lets the file be imported again without duplicates.

Importing it back

Importing the file back into the same place, your own people or the same team's, links every person, relation and source to what is already there and creates nothing new, except one place and one residence for each person's named, dated location (genealogy programs only know a residence). See Importing a family tree. Two things don't survive the round trip:

• Spouse citations on a couple with no marriage date are lost, because they sit on the couple's record and have nowhere to hang once read back.
• A date that lost its precision or its time on the way out can arrive as an other date rather than the preferred one.

Limits

A file holds up to 50,000 people. A timeline's file also fails at more than 50,000 family relations between its people. A file that is too large fails with a note saying so; a retry would fail the same, so export a smaller part. A timeline's tree is a way to get one.

You can request up to 20 GEDCOM files a day, from your people, your teams and your timelines together; failed ones don't count. This is separate from the allowance for booklets and posters. Your people, each team's people and each timeline can have one file in preparation at a time, and there is no wait between files, unlike the zip. Past the daily limit, the page tells you when you can request another. A file is kept for 7 days and can be downloaded 5 times; after that, request a new one.

Related

See Backing up your data for the zip of everything you own, Relations for the Tree view, and Printing and images for booklets and posters of a timeline.