In general, the ItsOurTree team has done a great job in the GEDCOM export. The information archived is amazing. Except for the links to photos, there is a lot of information stored in the GEDCOM. It is a good start in archiving and backing up your ItsOurTree site.

The completeness in transferring information from one genealogy program to another is suspect at most. This is because of because of the open structure of GEDCOM. Programmers cannot guarantee that everything you put into ItsOurTree will be uploaded to another program. As long as the relationships are intact, then you have a beginning. There are a lot of variables in how a programmer exports data and labels to each GEDCOM field. I seem to have read on the Google translation of the verwandt.de forum that ItsOurTree outsources its GEDCOM programming to a 3rd party. Also, the usefulness of a GEDCOM depends on how a receiving genealogy program reads and interprets the data in GEDCOM.

I have not tried every stand-alone genealogy program. The few I have tried (Legacy, WinFamily, and a few online freeware programs) left some things to be desired. In generally, I found that PhpGedView works the best. It was not easy to install on my Window’s workstation. PhpGedView has viewed almost everything archived in the ItsOurTree GEDCOM. Unicode is important to me.

A down side: once the GEDCOM imported to PhpGedView, the program cannot upload back to GEDCOM. Currently, I can only use the program for GEDCOM verificatiion. Later, if more users are interested, I will post about my experience using PhpGedView. You can view their wiki (http://wiki.phpgedview.net/en/index.php)

GEDCOM errors (as of the date of this post)

The married name has a format error, with a space missing between the married name and the field label and the data. The field title is _MARMN. This is the only tag PhpGedView cannot display.

There is an error in the date field for occupation. If there is only a year, not month or day, the ItsOurTree program places Feb 01 in the missing field. Further down the GEDCOM file it adds the year 1584 to subsequent occupation dates, even without any date entry. Apparently ItsOurTree’s editing team knows about that problem based on the Google translation of the http://www.verwandt.de/forum/

The GEDCOM output does not store the Display Name. You will need to store a copy of the Display Name if that is important to you (it is important to me because 1/3 of my tree names is in Chinese Unicode).

There is no storage of WWW sites. You have to back up the non email part of the contacts.

There is no section on ItsOurTree’s GEDCOM for the picture links. This is less of an issue since the photos are stored on some other server (we saw what happened when that Amazon server went down in July)

The every line in Biography is stored, but ItsOurTree labels each line: Bibliography. They have acknowledged the typographic error.

ItsOurTree does not correctly sequence the children by birthdates in GEDCOM.

Workarounds

Since everything is stored in the Biography (Bibliography), I make a copy of the display name and the WWW links in Biography. I then know the GECCOM back up will save my data. I have considered pasting the display name into the Title field since every title is copied also and my tree does not have anyone with a title.

I have archived manually each of the portraits and renamed them with the unique ID number ItsOurTree uses. This way I can reconnect them if the site closes.

I hope that helps the forum members understand how I archive my site. I wish this forum had more participation from ItsOurTree editors and users. Because there are more users on the German site, I lurk with Google Translation on www.verwandt.de/forum to learn what is new with ItsOurTree. I find that Geni.com has a very active forum where I can learn from the users of ItsOurTree’s competition.