Is there a preferred type of gedcom to upload?

Question

I use Legacy Family tree as my genealogy program on my home computer. I can export gedcoms in various formats, for instance Basic, Generic, PAF, and others. I have used generic until now but is there a better one to use?

Answer 1

A Basic GEDCOM file contains only the vital statistics, such as Name, sex, birth, christened, death, buried, and marriage.

A Generic GEDCOM file contains all of that in Basic, plus a user reference number, notes, sources, events, baptism, and marriage status.

The PAF formats were specific for Personal Ancestral File versions that handled notes, sources, and repositories in different ways. You can ignore this unless you are trying to import information into an old PAF program.

The Legacy format contains all the information that can be entered into a Legacy family file, such as pictures, video and sound references, tags, LDS ordinance dates, etc.

The GEDCOM 5.5 Only format contains only the fields (no extras) that conform to the GEDCOM 5.5 specification.

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I have used generic until now but is there a better one to use?

Generic, GEDCOM 5.5, and Legacy will be your best options (in that order).

Generic will contain more information than GEDCOM 5.5 that WikiTree may understand, Legacy contains the most information but some of it will not be understood and either discarded or shown as gibberish (Page: 1/FEB/2011 GEDCOM file Received and Imported into FTM2012).

For more information, see Help:Exporting a GEDCOM, What export options should you select?

Comments

Thank you, that answered it perfectly!