Starting a New Tree

PhpGedView (PGV) can contain and display one or more family trees, which may or may not be related to each other. The family tree data is stored in a file called by convention GEDCOM. It is recommended that you keep a single Gedcom for all related persons. It may be tempting to separate them into different sections, but the system is not very well suited to work with overlapping Gedcoms (It works reasonably well if there is only one person shared between two Gedcoms, although it requires additional layer (see Remote Link Individuals Across Websites And Databases). If you need to split a Gedcom, you can always do it later in PGV, which has tools for exporting part of the data based on different criteria (see Splitting a Gedcom).

If you have more than one Gedcom, you can select it by clicking on the Welcome Page icon.

Import Gedcom

The family tree or Gedcom can be imported or created from scratch. There are many genealogy programs, and virtually all of them can export their data in GEDCOM form. This is the reason why importing the Gedcom is an integral part of the PGV - many people have already done some work on their genealogy. If you already created your family tree, you can import it to PGV, and hopefully retain all the information. PGV is very tolerant to errors or unusual use of the standard, and generally will allow the import to proceed. After importing you can immediately start working with the data.

Create Gedcom from scratch

If PGV is your first attempt at genealogy research, you need to create a new Gedcom (family Tree) (see Create a new GEDCOM) Simply give it a name and accept default configuration. You can configure the Gedcom now, but you can also leave the configuration changes for later. The process will create a new Gedcom with a single person (temporarily named Given Names Surname). Start with this person, editing his/her name and gender, and proceed adding related persons.

Convert other formats to Gedcom

If you have a list of family information in some other format (e.g. as a Word document, excell spreadsheet), you can use some simple transformations to obtain an initial Gedcom file to upload