From GEDCOM File to Printed Family Tree Chart in Five Minutes

A walkthrough of turning a .ged file into a clean, printable family tree chart: uploading, choosing the central person and chart type, checking the layout and exporting.

You have a GEDCOM file and a wall that needs a family tree. This is the whole process with PrintFamilyTree, from upload to a print-ready file, and the decisions you make at each step.

1. Export and check your file

Export a GEDCOM with UTF-8 encoding and, if you want living relatives on the chart, with living people included. Open the file once in a text editor and confirm that the names look right.

2. Upload

Drag the .ged file onto the upload area. The file is parsed in your browser session and you see a summary: number of people, families, the date range and any warnings, such as people without a sex recorded or children listed in two families. Warnings do not stop the chart; they tell you what to expect.

3. Choose the central person

Search by name and pick the person the chart is about. For a gift, that is the recipient. For a reunion, it is the founding couple's husband or wife. For a surname study, the earliest known bearer of the name.

4. Choose the chart type and scope

• Hourglass: ancestors above, descendants below. Set how many generations up and down.
• Pedigree: ancestors only.
• Descendants: descendants only, with spouses.
• All relatives: everything, including the siblings of every ancestor and their descendants, with an optional limit on how deep the collateral lines go.

You can also switch off spouses to get a blood-line-only chart, or switch off siblings to keep an hourglass narrow.

5. Check the layout

The layout engine places every box so that nothing overlaps, spouses stay together, children hang under their parents in birth order and lines cross only where the data makes it unavoidable. Where a crossing cannot be avoided, the line hops over the other with a small arc.

Look at the preview for:

• Surprises in the data: a person drawn twice with a dashed box means they appear in two families; a child under a single parent means the other parent is missing in the file.
• Width: a very wide chart may want fewer collateral generations, or splitting into two charts.
• Names too long for the boxes: switch the label format to surname-first or to initials for the middle names.

Fixing the data is done in your genealogy program; re-export and upload again. The chart updates in seconds.

6. Choose the labels and the style

Name and dates is the default. Add places, or show only names for a compact poster. Choose the colour scheme (classic, monochrome for black-and-white printing, or a warmer palette) and the font size.

7. Export

• PDF in a chosen paper size for the print shop.
• SVG for editing in a vector program or for very large prints.
• PNG at two or three times the screen resolution for e-mail and social media.

Read our printing guide for paper sizes and resolution.

8. Print and share

Send the PDF to a poster printer or a copy shop, and e-mail the PNG to the family. Keep the GEDCOM and the exported files together; when a relative adds a correction, the next version is another five minutes.

If you would like to be told when PrintFamilyTree opens, leave your e-mail address on the home page. Early subscribers will be the first to try it.