The Open Data Promise

Last updated: September 19, 2026

Your family's history is not ours. It is not a hostage, a moat, or a reason you can't leave. Any family owner can download the whole thing — every person, every photo, every recorded voice — in one click, in a format built to outlive us.

What “the whole thing” means

Most services will export your names and dates. The photographs, the scanned certificates, the video of your grandmother explaining how she met your grandfather — those tend to stay behind, or arrive as a shoebox of files with no idea which person they belonged to. That is the part that actually hurts to lose.

A Rootfable archive is a single ZIP containing:

family-archive.zip
├── gedcom.ged      your tree, in FamilySearch GEDCOM 7
├── README.txt      what all of this is, in plain English
└── media/          every photo, document and video clip,
                    each one still attached to its person

Stories keep the name of whoever told them. Video clips keep the question the person was answering and a transcript of what they said. Nothing is flattened on the way out.

It needs no account, no subscription, and no Rootfable. It is a folder of files that will still open when we are long gone.

Why GEDCOM 7

GEDCOM is the lingua franca of family history — it is how Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, RootsMagic and everything else move trees between each other. Version 7, released by FamilySearch in 2021, is the modern one: proper Unicode (so names in every alphabet survive), a documented data model, a defined way to bundle media alongside the tree, and a designed mechanism for extensions.

What we added, and how we published it

Some of what Rootfable keeps has no tag in baseline GEDCOM: who in the family contributed a story, the prompt someone answered on camera, the transcript of a recording. GEDCOM 7 anticipated this. Extension tags are declared in the file's own header, each pointing at a URI where its meaning is written down — and readers are required to skip tags they don't know, so nothing else in the file is affected.

Ours are declared like this, and the links are real:

1 SCHMA
2 TAG _RF_AUTHOR https://rootfable.app/spec/v1#author
2 TAG _RF_DATE https://rootfable.app/spec/v1#date
2 TAG _RF_PROMPT https://rootfable.app/spec/v1#prompt
2 TAG _RF_TRANSCRIPT https://rootfable.app/spec/v1#transcript

You can read the full definitions at rootfable.app/spec/v1. The specification is dedicated to the public domain, so any other program — including a competitor — may implement it without asking. We intend to list these tags in the public extension registry at gedcom.io and to mirror the document in a public repository, so the definitions do not depend on our servers staying up.

Who decides what GEDCOM becomes

People ask us who owns this. GEDCOM was created by FamilySearch (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' genealogical arm) and version 7 is stewarded by them in the open, on GitHub at FamilySearch/GEDCOM, with input from a steering committee of the major genealogy vendors.

So there is no cabal and no closed door. If something we built turns out to be generally useful — provenance for crowd-contributed material, prompts and transcripts for recorded testimony — the right home for it is the standard itself, raised as an issue or a pull request in that repository, where every other vendor can argue with it. A future version of GEDCOM that absorbs this work and makes our extension tags redundant would be a good outcome. We would rather be a contributor to the commons than the proprietor of a dialect.

Coming in and going out

The door swings both ways. You can import a GEDCOM from Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage or any other program; new relatives are matched against your existing tree and queued for an admin to review, rather than dumped in as duplicates. We are also pursuing direct integration with the FamilySearch API, so families who keep research there can sync it without a manual file shuffle.

Where this stands today

Full export — tree and media — is available to every family owner and admin, at any time, without asking us for it.
Every member can take a copy of the tree, not just the owner: GEDCOM or JSON, from the People page. Relatives who may still be living go out as name and relationship only — they stay in the tree, in their right place, with no dates, places or notes attached. The file says so, in the standard RESN CONFIDENTIAL notice and in plain English, so the blanks read as a decision rather than as missing research. Each download is recorded for the family's admins, and the member is told that before they click.
Export is not a paid feature. Every family on the free tier can take everything with them.
The export format is an open standard with a published specification, not something only we can read.
Deleting a family space is something its owner does themselves, from the admin page — see the privacy policy for what happens to the data afterwards.

We intend to keep it that way. The measure of this is simple: we want to keep your family's history because the product is good, not because we are holding it.