What is GEDCOM?
I have an old family group record with a fair amount of information that I cannot find in family search. I don't know if this record is from a good source. How do I verify the authenticity of the information on the document? There is an AFN number. How can I look that number up?
Answers
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GEDCOM is a file format for exchanging genealogical data between different systems.
"Number lookup"? Maybe these links can help. The 2nd one seems to be the front door search entry point by name vs. number in the "Genealogies" legacy database (user submitted trees). Good researching!
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GEDCOM is a file format for genealogical data. Like html and xml, it is text-based, meaning that people can (and do) extract information from such files even without having a genealogy program available for parsing them, but almost every genealogy program, app, and website out there can interpret the format, and most of them can generate it, too. (Ironically, FamilySearch's Family Tree cannot, despite the format being FamilySearch's invention, originally.)
AFN stands for Ancestral File Number, and you can search by it under Genealogies (https://www.familysearch.org/search/genealogies): click More Options, choose Ancestral File Number under Add Record Options, and type or paste in the number. Note that AFN searches cannot have any other search fields.
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