FamilySearch GEDCOM Size and Individual Limits: What We Found

We looked for a definitive answer to "how large can my GEDCOM file be before FamilySearch rejects it?" This is what we could actually confirm, with sources — and, just as important, what we couldn't confirm, because a guessed number would be worse than none.

The one hard number: 100 MB

FamilySearch's own Help Center article, "Copy a GEDCOM file into Family Tree," states a 100 MB cap for GEDCOM uploads. This is the only limit FamilySearch documents as an actual technical ceiling, and it lines up with real failure reports: one FamilySearch Community user reported being unable to upload a 107 MB file — a few megabytes over the line, rejected outright.

If your GEDCOM is anywhere near 100 MB, that's the first thing to check, and it's the one diagnosis we can state with full confidence.

The soft number: "around 100 names"

The same Help Center article recommends keeping files to about 100 names, but frames it as a manageability suggestion for the compare-and-add workflow — the manual, one-record-at-a-time process of matching your file's people against Family Tree's existing records — not as a hard limit. FamilySearch has never published an individual-count ceiling that causes uploads to fail outright.

Third-party sources repeat the same 100-name figure without adding a technical justification beyond ease of review, which tells us it's genuinely a usability recommendation rather than a disguised technical constraint.

What happens beyond 100 names, in practice

Since there's no official number here, we looked at real outcomes reported in the FamilySearch Community forum:

• A file with roughly 1,000 individuals uploaded "successfully" but returned a "some records were not uploaded correctly" message — data loss without a clear cause.
• A file with over 2,500 individuals resulted in only two people appearing afterward — most of the tree silently vanished.
• A file with roughly 94,300 individuals produced results described as effectively unusable.
• By contrast, genealogy software developer Louis Kessler successfully uploaded a 6,413-individual file — slow (about 15 minutes for the compare step, hours of manual review for matches), but functional.

Read together, these point to individual count mattering less as a strict cutoff and more as a rising-risk curve: comfortable under a few hundred, increasingly likely to cause silent data loss or unmanageable review load somewhere in the low thousands, and reported as broken at the tens-of-thousands scale.

What we're not going to claim

We're not going to tell you "files over X individuals will fail" — FamilySearch doesn't say that, and no amount of forum-reading turns a pattern into a documented rule. What we can say: if your file is near or over 100 MB, expect an outright failure. If it's comfortably under that but has more than roughly 1,000 individuals, expect the upload to "succeed" while quietly dropping or garbling data, and budget real time for manual review regardless of size. See Common GEDCOM Upload Error Messages, Explained for what each of these outcomes actually looks like in FamilySearch's interface.

If you want a straight answer for your specific file rather than these general patterns, the Upload Readiness Checker parses it locally in your browser and checks it against these exact thresholds. For the structural side of things — how GEDCOM actually organizes each individual's data, which is part of why larger files get harder to process cleanly — see Understanding GEDCOM's Level/Tag/Value Structure.