Ancestry: How to Export and Troubleshoot Your GEDCOM

Ancestry is both the most common source of GEDCOM files genealogists export from and a common destination they upload files to — and each direction has its own specific mechanics and limits worth knowing before you run into them.

Exporting a GEDCOM from Ancestry

From your tree view, click the tree name in the upper-left corner, select View Tree Settings, then click Export Tree under "Manage your tree." Ancestry generates the file server-side — for a large tree this can take several minutes, and you can navigate away and come back once it's ready rather than waiting on the page. When it's done, click Download Your GEDCOM File.

Two things trip people up here. First, only the tree owner can do this — if you're a Guest, Contributor, or Editor on someone else's tree, you won't see the export option no matter what level of edit access you otherwise have; you'd need the actual owner to run the export. Second, a documented browser quirk sometimes delivers the file with a .txt extension instead of .ged. If that happens, right-click the download button and choose "Save Link As" (Chrome/Firefox) or "Download Linked File As" (Safari) instead of a plain click, and rename the extension to .ged if needed — the file's actual content is unaffected, only the extension is wrong.

What doesn't come with the export

Ancestry's GEDCOM export is text-only, matching the format's own limits: photos, attached documents, DNA match data, and Ancestry's own "hints" don't travel with the file, since none of those are part of the GEDCOM standard itself. Source citations sometimes don't transfer cleanly either, particularly for unusually long or hyphenated names and places — worth a manual spot-check in whatever program you import the file into next.

Uploading a GEDCOM to Ancestry

To create a new tree from a GEDCOM file, go to the Trees tab, select Create & Manage Trees, then Upload a GEDCOM file. Ancestry's documented cap here is 75 MB — smaller than FamilySearch's 100 MB limit, so a file that uploads fine to one platform can still be rejected by the other. If your file is near that size, see How to Split a Large Family Tree Before Uploading, or run it through the Upload Readiness Checker first — while its thresholds are researched against FamilySearch specifically, checking your file's raw size and individual count is useful groundwork before any platform's upload.

Ancestry trees are public by default once uploaded: any Ancestry member can see deceased individuals in the tree, while living people's full names are automatically hidden. If that's not what you want, you can uncheck the public-tree option during upload, or change it afterward in tree settings.

Duplicates are a known side effect of Ancestry's hint system

If you're troubleshooting a messy Ancestry tree before exporting it, it's worth knowing that Ancestry's record-hint and "shared tree" features are a common source of the same person appearing twice under slightly different names or dates — often introduced when a hint gets accepted onto the wrong existing person instead of merged with their real match. See Duplicate Individuals: How They Happen and How to Find Them for how to spot these before they carry over into whatever you're exporting to next.

Before you send the file anywhere else

Once you have your .ged file in hand, it's worth a structural check before importing it into another program or platform — an export that looks fine in Ancestry's own tree view can still carry broken links or contradictory dates that only a validator will catch. The Validator checks the whole file in your browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere.

Sources: Ancestry GEDCOM upload/download instructions, via Mackiev support; Family History Daily — Downloading Your Tree From Ancestry.com.