I disagree a bit with Dick on this one, David. Gedcoms are nothing to fear. FOW automatically produces a lovely gedcom and the help section can get you through any bumps you might encounter. That said, there's nothing wrong with exporting and importing some practice gedcoms to get the feel and you do want to learn what a .lst file is and what it looks like but read the spec?, don't bother. Did you read the spec for MSWord? Of course not, you went to the help section when you needed to learn to do something. Try it, you'll like it. Paul David R. Holloway wrote: > Dick Wells said: > >> A word of advice to those not really up to speed on GEDCOM's - learn > everything you can and practice importing and exporting. Learn about > the LST (error) file and it's messages too. < > > Oh dear. > > My interest is in Family History and to accomodate that I try to > understand every which-way of Family Origins but I have baulked at > tangling with GEDCOMS. It now seems that I have no choice but to get > my feet wet so how best can this be done without wading through the > full GEDCOM spec (which I assume is available somewhere? > > David