goged

A fast terminal browser for GEDCOM genealogy files. Search people by name and any other property, read their life events in order, jump between relatives, and explore pedigree and descendant trees — all from the keyboard.

The screenshots below use the GEDCOM-L sample file.

Search with a year range; results show lifespans and birth places.

Person view with the relationship to a marked reference person, and birth and adoptive parents.

Pedigree chart of ancestors.

Descendant chart with spouses, marriage years and an adopted child.

The experimental map shows places that have coordinates.

Features

• Search as you type over names (diacritic-insensitive, alternate and married names included, phonetic matching) and over any other property: dates, places, occupations, notes, sources, arbitrary GEDCOM tags.
• Person view with parents, siblings and half-siblings, every family with spouse and children, associated people (godparents, witnesses, friends: ASSO, _ASSO) and records that may describe the same person (ALIA), notes and sources with quoted text. All relatives are links: move the cursor and press enter to jump; go back and forward like in a web browser.
• Life timeline of important events in chronological order, with the person's age at each event, optionally interleaved with the births, marriages and deaths of close relatives during their lifetime.
• Tree views: a horizontal pedigree chart of ancestors and an indented descendant chart with spouses, both navigable with the arrow keys, re-rootable, and adjustable from 2 to 20 generations. Ancestors who appear more than once in a pedigree, as after a marriage between cousins, have their own ancestors drawn only once; elsewhere these read "truncated as duplicate", and enter or space there moves them to that place.
• Events browser listing all (or only the vital) events of the file in chronological order, with a filter for type, year range, place and names.
• Places browser: every place in the file arranged by jurisdiction (country → county → town) with the number of events and people, collapsible and filterable. Select a place to list everything that happened there and in the places within it, then open the people involved.
• Map (experimental): a zoomable world map drawn with Braille characters, with coastlines, country borders, rivers and lakes, and a marker for every place that has coordinates (PLAC → MAP → LATI/LONG, or the place record the place refers to). The map data is compiled into the executable, so goged stays a single file.
• Relationship calculator: mark a reference person and every person view tells how they are related ("Harold Smith's third cousin", "half-great-aunt", "brother-in-law", "husband's aunt", "co-father-in-law", "adoptive father"), including the closest common ancestors. Blood relationships follow birth links only; adoptive, foster and step links are named as such.
• Statistics and validation: counts, time span, generations, lifespans, most common names, the events that happened on this day in earlier years, and all warnings found while reading the file.
• Privacy: data marked confidential or private (RESN) is hidden unless you ask for it.
• Batch mode for scripts: print search results, charts, timelines, relationships, events and statistics without starting the interface.

Robust GEDCOM support

• GEDCOM 5.5, 5.5.1 and 7.0, read leniently: malformed lines, level jumps, links recorded on only one side and similar defects are repaired where possible and reported as warnings instead of aborting.
• Character sets: UTF-8 (with or without BOM), UTF-16 LE/BE, ANSEL (including combining diacritics), Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, IBM PC (CP437/850) and MacRoman, detected from the byte order mark and the CHAR header.
• The full date grammar: ABT, CAL, EST, BEF, AFT, BET … AND …, FROM … TO …, INT … (phrase), dual years such as 1750/51, B.C. dates, and the Gregorian, Julian, Hebrew and French Republican calendars, converted to a common timeline for sorting and age calculation. Common deviations such as full month names, Abt., circa or ISO dates are accepted too.
• CONT/CONC continuation lines, shared notes (NOTE/SNOTE records), place records (_LOC, as agreed by GEDCOM-L: places written differently but referring to the same record are grouped, and their coordinates, other names and GOV identifiers are used), source citations, adoption and fostering (PEDI, per parent through ADOP.FAMC.ADOP or _FREL/_MREL) and custom _TAGS; any custom tag with a date or place is treated as an event.

Installation

Download a ready-made binary from the releases page: one universal binary for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and binaries for Linux and Windows on x86-64 and ARM64. File names carry the build date, e.g. goged-2026-10-08-linux-amd64. On macOS and Linux run chmod +x on the file first; macOS may also ask you to allow the unsigned binary (xattr -d com.apple.quarantine goged-*-macos-universal).

To build from source you need Go 1.24 or later:

go install github.com/efi/goged@latest

or from a checkout:

go build -o goged .

Usage

goged family.ged                 # open the browser
goged -person I42 family.ged     # open the browser at a person
cat family.ged | goged -         # read from standard input

Data marked confidential or private (RESN confidential or privacy) is hidden: restricted events and structures are left out, and of restricted people and families only names and family links remain. The header and -stats say how much was withheld; -show-restricted shows everything.

Batch mode prints to standard output and exits:

goged -q 'surname:jones born:<1850' family.ged
goged -tree I20 -gen 5 family.ged          # pedigree chart (ancestors)
goged -desc I1 -ascii family.ged           # descendant chart, ASCII lines
goged -timeline I14 family.ged             # life events incl. relatives
goged -relate I20,I23 family.ged           # how is I23 related to I20?
goged -events 'type:marr place:leeds' family.ged
goged -events '' -all family.ged           # every event, chronologically
goged -places family.ged                   # place hierarchy with counts
goged -stats family.ged                    # statistics and warnings
goged -licenses                            # licenses of map data and libraries

$ goged -relate I20,I23 testdata/family.ged
Dorothy Jones is Harold Smith's third cousin.
Closest common ancestors: William Smith & Elizabeth Brown (4 and 4 generations up).

$ goged -tree I14 -gen 3 testdata/family.ged
                                                       ┌─ John Smith (1817–1880) ▸
                          ┌─ Thomas Smith (1842–1910) ─┤
                          │                            └─ Ann Taylor (1820–1845)
Arthur Smith (1866–1940) ─┤
                          └─ Jane Doe (1844–)

$ goged -desc I3 -gen 3 testdata/family.ged
John Smith (1817–1880)
├── ⚭ Ann Taylor (1820–1845)  m. 1840
│   └── Thomas Smith (1842–1910)
│       └── ⚭ Jane Doe (1844–)  m. 1865
│           └── Arthur Smith (1866–1940) ▾
└── ⚭ Sarah White (1825–1890)  m. 1847
    ├── Emma Smith (1848–)
    │   └── ⚭ Friedrich Müller (1845–)  m. 1870
    │       └── Edith Miller (1872–)
    └── George Smith (1850–1851)

▸ and ▾ mark people with more ancestors or descendants beyond the generation limit.

Try it with the sample file in testdata/family.ged.

Keys

Where	Keys	Action
Global	/	search
	tab / shift+tab, 1…7 (alt+1…alt+7 while typing)	switch view: search, person, tree, events, places, map, stats
	b, backspace, [ / ]	back / forward in history
	m	mark the current person as reference for relationships (again to clear)
	?	help · L licenses · q, ctrl+c quit
Search	type, ↑ ↓ pgup pgdown, enter, esc	search, select, open, clear / return
Person	↑ ↓ (j k), enter	move between relatives, go to relative
	← → (h l)	back / forward
	t / d	pedigree / descendant tree of this person
	c	show or hide relatives' events in the timeline
Tree	arrows (h j k l)	move: ← towards the root, → away from it, ↑ ↓ to the previous or next person (in a pedigree: of the same generation)
	enter / space	open person / make them the root; on "truncated as duplicate": show those ancestors here instead
	p d v, + -	pedigree, descendants, toggle; more or fewer generations
Events	f, a, x, enter	edit filter, all/important events, clear filter, open person
Places	← → (h l), - / +	collapse/expand a place (or go to the enclosing/first contained place); collapse/expand all
	enter, esc	list the events at a place and within it (enter again opens the person); back to the places
	f, x, M	filter places by name, clear the filter, show the place on the map
Map	arrows (h j k l), + -	pan, zoom
	n / N, enter	next/previous place (most events first), list the events at the place
	0, w, c	fit all places, whole world, center on the selected place
Stats	enter	list everybody with the selected surname

Search syntax

All terms must match. Text without a field matches names: every word of a name is compared by prefix, so jo smi finds John Smith; diacritics and case are ignored (muller finds Müller), and so are apostrophes (obrien and o'brien both find O'Brien).

Query	Matches
smith, "van der berg"	name words starting with smith; an exact phrase
~smyth	names that sound alike (Soundex and the Cologne phonetics for German names agree): Smith, Smyth, Schmidt
given:john, surname:smith	one part of the name (also first:, last:, name:)
born:1850, died:1900	year of birth / death; baptism and burial count when there is no birth or death date
born:1840..1860, born:<1900, born:>=1850, born:~1850, born:1850s	year ranges (~ = ±5 years)
born:leeds, died:york	place of birth / death
place:york, year:1881	any event at a place / in a year (dates before or after a year count for that year only)
alive:1900	possibly alive in that year
sex:f	m, f, u (unknown) or x
id:I12 or just I12	a record identifier
occupation:weaver, note:mill, source:census, any:text	occupations, notes, cited sources, any value
has:parents	birth death parents father mother spouse children siblings notes sources media occupation
tag:_MILT, tag:BIRT.PLAC=leeds	a tag (path) exists, optionally with a value
-term	exclude: smith -given:john, -has:parents
1850	a bare year matches the year of birth or death

Approximate dates match generously: ABT 1850 matches 1848–1852, BEF 1850 matches 1840–1850.

The events filter understands type:marr,div (tags or names such as birth, marriage, census), year ranges (1850..1870 or year:), place:, name:, negation and plain text.

The map (experimental)

Coordinates are read from the standard GEDCOM structure below a place:

2 PLAC TheSpecificPlace
3 MAP
4 LATI N50.781464
4 LONG E10.786089

Signed decimals (-0.1278), a trailing hemisphere letter (50.78N) and a decimal comma are accepted as well. A place gets the coordinates of the first event that records them.

The map shows the 1:10m coastlines, land borders, rivers and lakes of Natural Earth, including the regional supplements with smaller rivers in Europe, North America and Australia. The data is simplified to about 0.005° and stored in a compact format (worldmap/world.bin, 1.8 MB) that is embedded into the executable. Minor rivers and lakes appear as you zoom in. To rebuild the data from the Natural Earth GeoJSON files (each layer takes a comma-separated list of files):

go run ./worldmap/mkworld -o worldmap/world.bin \
    -coast ne_10m_coastline.geojson \
    -borders ne_10m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.geojson \
    -rivers ne_10m_rivers_lake_centerlines.geojson,ne_10m_rivers_europe.geojson,ne_10m_rivers_north_america.geojson,ne_10m_rivers_australia.geojson \
    -lakes ne_10m_lakes.geojson

Licenses

Natural Earth map data is in the public domain; goged credits it with "Made with Natural Earth". The licenses of the map data and of all libraries compiled into goged can be read in the program (L) or printed with goged -licenses. After changing dependencies, regenerate the embedded license texts with scripts/gen-licenses.sh.

Development

go test ./...                       # unit, golden and interface tests
go test -race -cover ./...
go test -fuzz FuzzParse ./gedcom    # fuzz the parser (also FuzzParseDate, FuzzParseLine)
go test -fuzz FuzzParse ./search    # fuzz the query language
go test -bench . ./search

Releases are built by the Release workflow: open Actions → Release → Run workflow on GitHub. It runs the tests, builds all binaries with scripts/build-release.sh (which also works locally and writes to dist/) and publishes them as a release tagged with the build date; a second run on the same day replaces that day's release.

Package	Contents
gedcom	line parser, character set detection and ANSEL decoding, node tree, typed model (individuals, families, events, names, places, sources, notes), dates and calendars
genealogy	relationship calculator, life timelines, place hierarchy, statistics
search	query language, diacritic folding, Soundex and Cologne phonetics, person index, event filter
chart	pedigree and descendant charts with node positions for navigation
worldmap	embedded Natural Earth map data, Web Mercator projection and Braille renderer; mkworld converts GeoJSON
licenses	embedded third-party license texts
tui	the Bubble Tea interface
main.go	command-line entry point and batch mode

The interface is built with Bubble Tea, Bubbles and Lip Gloss.