For years of genealogy work already done elsewhere
Bring your history with you.
GEDCOM is the standard file format almost every genealogy tool can export. Bloodline reads it, shows you exactly what it found, and lets you decide what to keep.
What a GEDCOM import brings in
- People, with names, sex, birth and death dates and places
- Parent-child relationships, including adoptive and step relationships
- Marriages and divorces, with dates and places where recorded
- Occupation, residence, education, and burial/resting place
- Notes and biographical text attached to a person
What doesn’t come across
- Photographs and scanned documents — GEDCOM only references media by URL; the files themselves usually live in your old tool, not the file
- Memories, the life-event timeline’s free-form entries, and the Keepsake illustrated biography — these are Bloodline-specific and have no GEDCOM equivalent to import from
A complete archive export/import, including photos and documents, is in progress and not yet generally available.
How the import itself works
Reviewed before anything applies.
Merge or replace
Merge new people and updates into an existing tree, or replace it entirely — you choose which, and replacing a tree still keeps a backup (below) in case you change your mind.
Review before it applies
Before anything is saved, you see exactly which people are new, which existing profiles would be updated, and can uncheck anything you don’t want.
Duplicate safeguards
Likely duplicate people are flagged for review rather than merged automatically, both during import and any time afterward — an existing tree is never silently doubled up.
If something doesn’t look right
You can always go back.
Bloodline keeps automatic backups of your tree. If an import doesn’t look the way you expected, a family owner can restore an earlier backup from Family Settings — no import is a one-way door.