What you can upload
GEDCOM files with a .ged or .gedcom extension. The parser reads GEDCOM 5.5.5 and stays compatible with 5.5.1 and with the extra tags Ancestry, MyHeritage and Geni write into their exports. The character encoding is detected from the file itself, so an export saved as UTF-8, UTF-16 or ANSEL is read the way it was written.
How an import runs
An upload becomes a job you can watch: the file is read, parsed and then indexed, and the job page shows which stage it is at. A job that fails says why on the same page rather than disappearing.
We read your file exactly as it is and tell you what is inside - before importing.
Open:Upload GEDCOM
AutoTreeGen mark
A GEDCOM exported from AutoTreeGen carries a mark in its header: the tree, its version, the export date and a fingerprint of the file contents. When such a file is uploaded, the import job page says what the mark shows: exported from AutoTreeGen and unchanged since, changed after export, a mark we did not issue, a mark that could not be read, or no mark at all, which is normal for a file from another program. A changed file is still imported; the mark only tells you whether it is the same file we exported.
What the export fills in and how it is marked
A GEDCOM downloaded from AutoTreeGen never says that a person's sex is undefined, and never carries a placeholder as a name. Sex: when the source file left it blank, the platform fills it by one rule - a husband in any family is M, a wife is F; otherwise an unambiguous given name decides (a name that is male in one culture and female in another, such as Andrea or Jean, decides only together with the country of birth). Every value filled this way is recorded in the person's provenance with the rule that set it. A person the rule cannot decide is not guessed: they appear on the Conflicts page as a one-click M or F choice, and until you choose, their record goes out without a SEX line. Names: a token such as PLACEHOLDER, UNKNOWN, N.N. or ? is not a name. It is removed from the NAME line (PLACEHOLDER /van Praag/ becomes /van Praag/) and kept in the file as 2 _ATG_NAME_WITHHELD PLACEHOLDER, so nothing is lost and the same file imports back exactly. Living and Private on their own are a privacy mask, not a placeholder, and are left as they are.
The tree view
Open tree takes you to the graph. It opens on ROOT and draws a bounded set of ancestors around them, which is why a tree of a quarter of a million people still opens at once. Click a person to open their page; the tabs beside the graph list the people, the couples, the places and the sources of the same tree. The graph does not load the whole tree into the browser, and it does not let you drag people between families.
Open:All trees
People, families, places, sources and statistics
Each tree carries five list pages. People is a searchable table with birth and death years. Families lists every couple the file contains. Places shows the canonical place names the tree uses, not every raw spelling, so a stray research note is not counted as a town. Sources lists the documents in import order. Statistics gives the counts, the oldest birth year, the pedigree depth and the most common surnames. All five read the tree as it is; none of them edits it.
Exporting from Ancestry
AutoTreeGen has no live connection to an Ancestry account, so an Ancestry tree cannot be linked here. The workflow is: export the tree from Ancestry as a GEDCOM, download the file, then upload that file here. In Ancestry this sits under the tree settings, and the export is emailed or offered as a download once it is ready.
Exporting from MyHeritage
The same shape: MyHeritage offers a GEDCOM export of a site's family tree, and the file it produces is uploaded here like any other GEDCOM. There is no live MyHeritage tree connection in AutoTreeGen; the DNA side of MyHeritage is covered in the DNA topic.
Reconstruct a tree from a document
A descendant list, a family story, a captioned photo album or a screenshot of a chart can become a tree without you retyping it. Upload the document (xlsx, docx, html, pdf, txt or an image, up to twenty-five megabytes; a scanned PDF up to twenty pages). The platform reads it and shows you the people and links it understood. Nothing is saved at that point. When you confirm, a GEDCOM is written and goes through the normal import, so the result lands on the dashboard like any other tree. A reading can be wrong, which is exactly why the preview comes first and the draft lives only on your screen until you say yes.
Large trees
Every plan has a ceiling on how many people one tree may hold, and a file above the site-wide ceiling is refused at the door rather than imported halfway. The free plan accepts a tree as large as Pro does; above 20,000 people on the free plan only the core is imported and run: the tree itself, its people and the duplicates search, while hypotheses, the Evidence Graph and research reports for that tree run on Pro. The current numbers per plan are on the Pricing page, which is where they are set.
Open:Pricing
Comparing two trees
Reconcile trees compares two of your uploaded trees and walks you through what it found: an overview, the people that may be the same person, the facts that contradict each other, and the branches that exist in one tree but not the other. You preview the outcome before anything is applied. Nothing is merged automatically.
Open:Compare trees
Photos
Photos opens the gallery of the tree you are working in: every photo that has a file behind it, with the people it belongs to, searchable by name. A person's own page has Add a photo. A photo whose GEDCOM entry has no file is listed separately and named as such; it is not shown as a picture it is not. On the free plan one photo per person, two hundred per tree and five megabytes per file are allowed; paid plans are not capped. Face detection and automatic person matching are not part of the product.
Open:Photo evidence
Managing your photos
On the Photos page, Add a photo lets you pick a person and upload a picture for them. Every photo has a menu, also inside the large view: use as profile photo, attach to a person, detach from one of several people, edit the caption and date, download, or remove. Tick several photos, or select all on the page, to delete or attach them in one step. After a delete an Undo appears, so a slip is easy to fix. If only some photos could be changed, the page names the ones that were not.
Reading a gravestone photo
On a person's photo, press Gravestone? and then Read the stone. You can add the cemetery name first. The platform reads the text on the stone, in Hebrew, Russian and English, including Hebrew dates, and checks the Hebrew date against the civil one. For every person named on the stone it proposes facts: birth, death, burial, the Hebrew name, the epitaph and who is buried beside them, each with the words from the stone. It also suggests who this is in your tree. Nothing is saved until you tick the facts and press Save the ticked facts. The stone becomes a source on each saved fact. If your tree already has the same date, the stone counts as a second source; if it has a different date, nothing is overwritten and you decide. A photo that is not a gravestone stays a normal photo. This uses the AI assistant, so it is part of the plans that include it.
The place field suggests places as you type
When you type a place for a birth, death or burial, the field offers places as you type: first places already in your own trees, then places written the same way in many other trees, as City, Region, Country, then places from the GeoNames world gazetteer, with other names a place is known by. Use the arrow keys and Enter, or choose Use exactly, which keeps your text as you typed it. A burial has its own cemetery field. If a cemetery was typed into the death place, one click moves it to the right field. The suggestions never stop you from saving. Only the place name is ever taken from another tree, never anything about its people.
Removing a wrong family link, with Undo
On a person's page, the Family panel lists parents, spouses and children. Each row has a small cutter icon, Detach from this person. Press it, confirm, and the link is removed; the people themselves stay in the tree. A message then offers Undo, which puts back exactly the same link. A spouse who has children with this person cannot be detached this way; detach the children first. To join two cards that are one person, use Merge with another person. To add a relative who is already in the tree, choose Someone already in this tree when you add the relative, so no second card is made.
"This cannot be right": your word about your own family
You know your own family. Under every parent, spouse and child on a person's page there is This cannot be right. Press it, say what is wrong, and add evidence if you have it: a record, a date, a place or a link. Press Remove this link and the link leaves your tree at once. Your words are kept as the evidence. The removed links are listed under Removed by you, with reason, and Put back returns any of them in one click. Only the owner of the tree can do this. A couple who still has children in the tree cannot be split this way; remove the child links first.
Voice-to-tree
Record a family memory on the tree's Voice page and it is transcribed for you. Recordings are sent to a transcription service, so the tree owner has to grant that consent first; without it the recorder stays disabled for everyone. The text of a session is kept with the tree and can be read by anyone with access. In this version transcripts are read-only, and nothing from them is added to a person automatically.
GEDeON
GEDeON is the workbench for the file itself rather than the tree behind it: it reads a GEDCOM and reports what is inside before you commit to an import. Use it when you want to know what a file contains, or what an import would lose.
Open:GEDeON
Step-by-step guides
Need help with this step?Ask the assistant