How to Export Your Family Tree from Ancestry as a GEDCOM

1. From any page on Ancestry, click the Trees tab and pick your tree.
2. In the toolbar down the left, click More (the three dots) and choose Tree Settings.
3. On the right of that page, under Manage your tree, click Export tree. If you see Download your GEDCOM file instead, jump to the last step.
4. Click Export. The button starts spinning and reads Generating a GEDCOM file.
5. When it stops, click Download Your GEDCOM File.

Those steps are Ancestry's own, from its Uploading and Downloading Trees help article. Two things surprise people. The flow has no options at all, so there is nothing to configure. And only the tree owner can do it: if you are a guest, contributor or editor on someone else's tree, the export is not yours to run.

This is worth saying because so many people assume otherwise and put off cancelling. Your tree data and Ancestry's record collections are separate things. Exporting takes the first with you and leaves the second behind, which is exactly what the format is for.

Renaming the .zip to .ged does not work, and produces a file that fails to open with no useful error. Once you have unzipped it, you can check the file is intact by dropping it into the free GEDCOM viewer: if your family appears as a chart, the export is fine.

Beyond media, Ancestry's help page does not enumerate what comes across. It does not say whether source citations and note text are included or dropped, and we are not going to fill that gap with a guess: other sites state it confidently, without a first-party source to point at. The honest answer is to look at your own export, because the answer is sitting in the file.

Drop the .ged into the GEDCOM validator for a count of sources and notes alongside any broken references, or into the GEDCOM converter for a spreadsheet with a citation count per person. Either takes about ten seconds and beats trusting a blog post about your own data.

• Documented as excluded: photos, documents and other media files.
• Documented as included from November 2022 onward: pointers to where your media lives on Ancestry, useful only for a return trip to Ancestry.
• Not documented either way: source citations, note text, and the GEDCOM version the file is written in. Check your own file.

This matters most when a relative asks for a copy. Open the file in the GEDCOM viewer and check the living generations, or use the branch option in the GEDCOM converter to send only the line they actually asked about instead of your whole tree.

One documented oddity: if the download throws a site-cannot-be-reached error, Ancestry's advice is to take special characters out of the tree name and try again. A tree called Mum's side (1890 - ) is a plausible culprit.

• Open it: the GEDCOM viewer renders it as a chart you can pan and zoom, with nothing to install.
• Check it: the GEDCOM validator scores the file and lists impossible dates, duplicates and broken links.
• Convert it: the GEDCOM converter turns it into a spreadsheet, JSON, or a single trimmed branch. See GEDCOM to Excel for what to do with the sheet.
• Import it: any serious tree program reads GEDCOM, as do the other big platforms.

Importing it into AncestorIQ is the version where the tree carries on growing: Deep Research searches multiple archives for the ancestors your export shows as dead ends, and you keep building by chatting rather than filling in forms. If you are new to the format itself, how to open a GEDCOM file covers the basics.

That asymmetry is the real reason to export sooner rather than later, even if you are staying. A GEDCOM sitting on your own disk is the only copy nobody else's pricing or product decisions can reach. If you are weighing where to keep the tree, our Ancestry alternatives comparison is honest about the trade-offs, and the MyHeritage export guide and FamilySearch export guide cover the same ground on those sites.