An open standard for sharing genealogical source records between societies, archives, and software.
Genealogical societies create transcribed record sets — cemetery indexes, marriage registers, census extracts, obituary abstracts — but there is no standard way to share them. Data gets trapped in proprietary platforms, static HTML pages, or random spreadsheets on a volunteer's laptop.
GENRECORD gives that data a portable, self-describing container that any software can read and any human can open in a text editor. One file. Plain text. Metadata header plus CSV data. No vendor lock-in.
It is not GEDCOM. GEDCOM is for family trees — individuals, families, relationships. GENRECORD is for source records — transcriptions, indexes, abstracts. They are complementary, not competing.
A structured header block. A separator line. CSV data. That's it.
##GENRECORD 1.0
#version: 1.0
#type: CEM
#title: Bexar County Cemetery Transcriptions
#society: San Antonio Genealogical and Historical Society
#created: 2026-03-29
#license: CC0
#coverage.place: Bexar County, Texas, USA
#coverage.dates: 1850-1975
---
record_id,surname,given,gender,birth_date,death_date,cemetery,cemetery_place,section,lot,condition,notes
1,Stricklin,Walter Davis,M,20 Apr 1892,14 Mar 1962,City Cemetery,San Antonio TX,A,14,Legible,
2,,,,,1901,City Cemetery,San Antonio TX,,,Illegible,Stone heavily weathered
3,Moreno,Luis Jimenez,M,1878,1931,San Fernando Cemetery,San Antonio TX,B,22,Partial,A .genrecord file opened in 2075 will look exactly like it looks today. No proprietary formats. No binary encoding. No dependencies.
The header carries everything a consumer needs — type, title, society, license, geographic scope, date range. No external manifest required.
A cemetery file contains cemetery records. A marriage file contains marriage records. No ambiguity about what you are looking at.
No owner. No gatekeeper. No license fees. No permission required. The standard itself is CC0 — free for any use by anyone for any purpose.
Producers can add custom fields using the x_ prefix convention. Consumers that don't recognize a custom field ignore it without error.
Minimal required fields. A damaged headstone with only a death year is valid GENRECORD. The format does not demand complete data — it demands honest data.
35 record types across 7 categories. Each with a defined field schema.
| Category | Types |
|---|---|
| Vital | BIRTH, DEATH, BURI, CEM, MARR, DIV |
| Legal | CENSUS, NAT, PROB, LAND, COURT, PRISON, TAX, VOTE, IMMIG, EMIG |
| Military | MIL |
| Religious | BAPT, CONF, CONGR, CLERGY, PROXY, EXCOM, BARMIT, INITIAT |
| Education | SCHOOL, DEGREE, CERT, TEACH |
| Newspaper | OBIT, MARANN, BIRTHANN |
| Compiled | BIO, BIBLE, FUNERAL |
GENRECORD files are designed to be trivially parseable — split on the separator, parse the header as key-value pairs, parse the data block as CSV. A functional parser can be written in any language in under fifty lines of code.
SocietyPress — a free, open-source WordPress platform for genealogical societies — supports native GENRECORD import and export.