About Genealogy Data Services Limited

Genealogy Data Services Limited (or more briefly Ged2X) is a company that specialises in providing services for processing files of genealogical data in the GEDCOM 5.5 format.

The services provided by Ged2X have a long pedigree that pre-dates the World-Wide Web. In 1991 a program was developed for displaying hyperlinked family tree information on Unix systems using X-Windows and Motif. Once the WWW came along a set of scripts based heaviliy on the Unix tools awk and sed were written to convert family tree data to HTML files. The next major step occurred in about the year 2000 when the web-based conversion tool Gedcom2XML was developed and made available to the public. Users were able to convert their Gedcom file to a single XML file, which in turn could be converted to HTML using XSLT, and then displayed in a web browser. Ged2X still provides this capability, but since 2006 has developed a series of additional web-based programs that convert a user's Gedcom file to HTML or XML and returns a pre-packaged family tree web site. Services for hosting users' family tree data on the Ged2X server are also available. There are future plans for a range of other genealogy data services.