Forebear guide
Find and fix the mistakes in your family tree
Trees grow by copying other people's trees, and errors travel with them. A mother born in 1949 listed for a child born in 1680 is a real example from a tree we tested. Forebear checks every person and every family link in your GEDCOM file.
Safe fixes such as date formats, capitalised names and messy place names are corrected automatically. Anything that needs a human decision is listed for you, worst problems first, and you download your tree with the fixes applied. Your sources, notes and photos links are kept exactly as they were.
What Tree Repair checks
These are the problems we flag, in the order we list them.
- Parents born after their children
- Deaths recorded before births
- Children born after a parent died
- Ages over 110 or births in the future
- Parents under 13 at a child's birth
- Mothers over 55 at a child's birth
- Likely duplicate people
- Missing birth dates and places
- Non-standard dates, fixed to GEDCOM format
- Names in capitals and messy place names, tidied
Why it matters for citizenship claims
Citizenship by descent depends on exact birth and naturalisation dates. One wrong date or a wrongly attached parent can make a valid claim look invalid, or send you ordering certificates for the wrong family. Repairing the tree first saves money on records later.
Questions people ask
Will it change my tree without asking?
It only applies formatting fixes automatically. Wrong parents, impossible dates and duplicates are listed for you to decide, because only you know which record is right.
Which programs can open the repaired file?
Any program that imports GEDCOM, including Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Gramps and Legacy.