gedcom4j

gedcom4j is a handy Java library designed to help you load and parse genealogy info. If you’re diving into family trees, this tool lets you bring the Genealogical Data Communication specs right into your Java projects! With gedcom4j, you can easily load data from GEDCOM 5.5 or 5.5.1 files into a friendly Java data structure.

Easy Setup for Everyone

This library comes packed as a single JAR file. To get started, just add the gedcom4j.jar file to your project’s classpath. If you're new to this, no worries! The online documentation will guide you through setting everything up. After you toss in the necessary code, accessing your genealogy data becomes a breeze by tweaking the properties of the gp.gedcom structure.

Manipulating Your Genealogy Data

Once you've migrated your GEDCOM data into a Java application, you can check it out and modify it however you want! Plus, here’s something cool: you can also create GEDCOM files using the same data model without needing to load any previous files.

Main Components of gedcom4j

gedcom4j has three main parts: a data model that includes all the new version 5.5.1 components along with some older stuff from version 5.5 that's now deprecated; a parser that can load UTF-8 and other supported encodings; and a writer that also handles UTF-8 encoding but is more forgiving than the parser.

Tips for Reading Different Files

If you're looking to read files made by other systems and want to rewrite them with gedcom4j, keep an eye on the multimedia section! It’s super important to make sure your data model matches up with whatever version of GEDCOM you're currently working with.