Introducing GENEALOGIX: An Open Format for the Family Archives We Actually Have

A portable, extensible archive format built on YAML and Git. Oral traditions, photographs, and vital records stand on equal structural footing, and every archive defines its own rules.

The format gap

Family history often starts with a shoebox of photographs, a phone recording of your grandmother telling a story she’ll only tell once, three spellings of your great-grandfather’s name across official records, and a cousin who remembers a different village of origin.

This is real family history. It’s messy, contradictory, multilingual, and stubbornly human. It does not fit neatly into rows and columns.

For decades, the dominant exchange format has been GEDCOM, first drafted in 1984.¹ It has been remarkably successful, but its conclusion-first architecture makes richer evidence models and new research domains difficult to represent. GEDCOM 7.0 (2021) added UTF-8, same-sex relationship support, and GEDZip multimedia bundling. Adoption has been slow, however, and the underlying model remains largely unchanged.²

We think family data deserves better infrastructure. Today we’re publicly introducing GENEALOGIX (GLX), an open specification for version-controlled, evidence-first family archives. GLX is the underlying data model for Oracynth and the foundation for everything we build. The specification is currently in beta, and we’re developing it in the open.

What GENEALOGIX is

GENEALOGIX is a permanent, human-readable archive format for genealogical research and related domains. Each person, event, relationship, source, and place in your archive lives in a plain YAML file inside a standard Git repository. The archive needs no proprietary database and can be opened in a text editor.

Here’s what a person looks like:

persons:
  person-margaret-chen:
    properties:
      name:
        value: "Margaret Mei-Ling Chen"
        fields:
          given: "Mei-Ling"
          surname: "Chen"
          prefix: "Margaret"
      gender: female
      born_on: "ABT 1923"
      born_at: place-guangzhou
    notes: |
      Name romanization varies across documents.
      Immigration records use "Mei Ling Chan."

Custom, human-readable identifiers. If you can read a text file, you can read your family history.

Evidence first, conclusions second

Most genealogy software stores a clean conclusion such as “Margaret Chen was born about 1923 in Guangzhou.” That presentation hides the reasoning: the source for 1923, whether it is primary or derivative, any document that gives 1921 instead, and the researcher’s basis for choosing between them.

GLX is built on an assertion-aware data model inspired by prior work in genealogical and archival standards.³ Instead of attaching facts directly to a person, GLX separates the claim from the evidence through a five-level chain:

Repository → Source → Citation → Assertion → Property

Each level serves a distinct role. A repository is the institution or location holding original materials, such as an archive, church, or government office. A source is a specific document or record held there, such as a birth register, census volume, or family Bible. A citation pinpoints a page number, entry reference, or passage within the source. An assertion connects that cited evidence to a specific claim about an entity and records the concluded value with the researcher’s confidence. A property is the researcher’s current accepted conclusion based on the available evidence.

This separation lets you record properties quickly during data entry and add rigorous assertions later during focused research. Multiple assertions, including contradictory ones, can coexist until you are ready to choose between them:

assertions:
  assertion-margaret-birth-cert:
    subject:
      person: person-margaret-chen
    property: born_on
    value: "1923-05-12"
    citations: [citation-hk-birth-cert]
    confidence: high
    notes: "Primary direct evidence."

  assertion-margaret-birth-bible:
    subject:
      person: person-margaret-chen
    property: born_on
    value: "1923-03-10"
    citations: [citation-chen-family-bible]
    confidence: medium
    notes: |
      Family Bible entry conflicts with certificate.
      Likely recorded from memory years later.

The structure has practical benefits. When your cousin sends a document that contradicts your timeline, your archive holds both versions without losing either. When tools for reading handwriting or translating documents improve, your original sources are still available to process again. Years later, you can return to a research question and find the reasoning in the file.

Your archive, your rules

Archive-owned controlled vocabularies are a defining feature of GENEALOGIX and its clearest departure from existing formats.

Traditional formats ship with fixed type systems chosen by a standards committee. Research domains that fall outside those event types, relationship types, and property categories have to improvise.

GLX inverts this. Each archive defines its own valid types in vocabulary files that ship alongside your data. The glx init command seeds standard vocabulary files covering common genealogy types, and then you extend them however your research demands:⁴

# vocabularies/relationship-types.glx: your archive, your types
relationship_types:
  marriage:
    label: "Marriage"
    description: "Legal or religious union"
  parent_child:
    label: "Parent-Child"
    description: "Biological, adoptive, or legal"

  # Your additions
  compadrazgo:
    label: "Compadrazgo"
    description: "Godparent/co-parent ritual kinship"
  chosen_family:
    label: "Chosen Family"
    description: "Enduring ties forged by care and obligation"
  mentor:
    label: "Mentor-Mentee"
    description: "Intellectual or professional mentorship"

GLX can therefore adapt to research domains far beyond traditional genealogy. A colonial history archive might define indenture and manumission events. An academic prosopography can add doctoral_advisor relationships, while maritime research can define ship_departure and port_arrival types. The standard vocabularies provide a starting point, and each archive can extend them.⁵

Your vocabularies need no central registry, approval process, or committee. They are versioned in Git alongside your data, and the CLI validates everything against them:

glx validate
# ✓ All entity references valid
# ✓ All vocabulary types defined
# ⚠ Unknown property "clan_affiliation" (not in person-properties.glx)

The last line is a warning, not an error, so GLX lets you keep working while a new property is still being formalized. Broken references are errors; properties you haven’t formalized yet are only warnings.

Oral traditions and multimedia as first-class evidence

We’ve written before about the politics of preservation and about FAN networks and the future of family history. GLX puts those critiques into practice.

In the assertion model, an audio recording of your grandmother describing her childhood carries the same structural weight as a certified birth certificate. Each source can produce citations and support assertions with explicit confidence levels. The researcher ranks the evidence and records that judgment transparently:

assertions:
  assertion-family-migration:
    subject:
      person: person-abuela-rosa
    property: residence
    value: place-san-juan
    date: "FROM 1952 TO 1960"
    media: [media-oral-history-rosa-2024]
    confidence: medium
    notes: |
      Based on oral history interview recorded 2024-01-15.
      Rosa describes arriving "when Eisenhower was president"
      and leaving "before Kennedy." No documentary confirmation
      yet, but consistent with Operation Bootstrap migration patterns.

This matters for communities whose histories were never prioritized by official record-keeping systems, a reality we explored in our piece on the destruction of Palestinian archives. GLX supports family stories held in oral tradition, community memory, photographs, and home videos as directly as it supports government files.

Git is the archive

We chose Git as the storage layer for reasons that go beyond developer familiarity. Git provides exactly the properties that archival data needs: immutable history, branching for collaborative research, and cryptographic verification that nothing has been silently altered.⁶

When your family archive is a Git repository:

Every edit is permanent. You can see exactly what your archive looked like at any point in time, who changed what, and when. No more wondering which copy of a file is current.
Collaboration scales. Multiple family members or researchers can work on separate branches and merge their contributions using a workflow familiar to millions of software teams.
You own your data. The repository is the archive. Back it up anywhere. Host it anywhere. Move it anywhere. There is no proprietary export step because the repository already holds your files in plain text.
Offline works by default. Git doesn’t need a network connection, so you can edit on a plane and sync when you land. Offline access follows directly from the architecture.

You don’t need to be a developer to use Git. Tools like GitHub Desktop provide a visual interface, and the glx CLI handles the genealogy-specific parts for you.

Where GLX fits

GLX provides the data layer beneath family trees, reports, research platforms, and other applications. Visualization belongs to the tools built on top of the format.

The specification is currently at v0.0.0-beta.3, and it will change as the format matures. We’re developing it in the open because a format this fundamental deserves public scrutiny.

GEDCOM interoperability

GLX complements GEDCOM, which has forty years of ecosystem momentum. The glx import command translates GEDCOM files into GLX archives and handles four decades of vendor extensions and encoding quirks.

Update, September 6, 2026: GEDCOM export is now available, completing bidirectional conversion. When this post was first published, export was planned for later in 2026. Because GLX captures richer data than GEDCOM can represent, GEDCOM export is inherently lossy. Keep the GLX archive as your complete copy.

# Import your existing GEDCOM file
glx import family.ged -o my-family-archive

# Creates a full GLX archive with vocabularies,
# entities, and source citations preserved

If you have decades of research in GEDCOM files, you can import what you have. GLX preserves your sources, citations, and relationships, then gives you room to enrich them with the evidence model described above.

An open specification with open tooling

We’re shipping the glx-go reference implementation alongside the format, including a parser, validator, GEDCOM importer, and CLI. It handles the gnarliest interoperability work and provides the glx init, glx validate, and glx import commands.

We think the pattern of open spec, open tooling, and shared conformance tests is how you build trust in a format that’s going to hold families’ most precious data. The specification, JSON schemas, examples, and test suites are available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.⁷

Get involved

The GENEALOGIX specification repository is live at github.com/genealogix/glx, with documentation at genealogix.io. You’ll find the complete specification, JSON schemas for validation, working examples from minimal archives to fully-cited family histories, and a test suite covering every entity type.

We’d love to hear from genealogists frustrated by existing formats, developers building family-history tools, historians working in domains current software cannot accommodate, and anyone concerned about their family’s stories surviving the next platform migration. File an issue, start a discussion, or read the spec and tell us what we got wrong.

Your family’s history is too important to be trapped in someone else’s database.

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GEDCOM was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beginning in 1984. Version 5.5.1 (1999) remains the most widely implemented version. See FamilySearch, “The FamilySearch GEDCOM Specification.” ↩
GEDCOM 7.0 was released June 2021. As of early 2026, major vendors including Ancestry and MyHeritage have not fully implemented 7.0 support. See the GEDCOM 7.0 registry of implementations. ↩
The assertion model is inspired by: the GENTECH Genealogical Data Model (2000) and its three-tiered evidence architecture; CIDOC-CRM E13 Attribute Assignment (ISO 21127) for formal assertion modeling; and GEDCOM-X for its Information → Evidence → Hypothesis → Conclusion → Proof hierarchy. ↩
The standard vocabulary files cover: event types, relationship types, place types, source types, repository types, media types, participant roles, confidence levels, and property vocabularies for persons, events, relationships, places, media, repositories, sources, and citations. ↩
GLX’s extensibility makes it suitable for traditional genealogy, biographical research, prosopography (collective biography), colonial and local history, maritime research, religious studies, historical demography, and other domains involving people, events, and relationships. ↩
You don’t need to use Git to use GLX. The files are valid YAML regardless of whether they’re in a repository. But Git integration is where the format’s collaborative and archival properties come alive. See the specification’s Archive Organization section. ↩
GENEALOGIX is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Copyright 2025-2026 Oracynth, Inc. ↩