Inspect GEDCOM sources

The v0.7 source-level GEDCOM workspace provides read-only local intake and an explicit root choice. It is not yet evidence of a supported packaged genealogy workflow. It does not import, merge, export, change a source, select a provider, or upload records. Use fictional fixtures when testing or sharing evidence.

Add and order sources

  1. Wait for startup to report Ready, then open GEDCOM or press G from workspace navigation.
  2. Choose Add GEDCOM source and select a GEDCOM file in the native chooser. Cancel if the requested file or purpose is unexpected. There is no typed path fallback.
  3. Wait for its inspection. Queued, running, cancelling, and safe-point states are announced to screen readers. When the worker supplies bounded progress, the running state also reports completed and total work units. Use Cancel from the keyboard or pointer to stop a pending inspection. A completed summary shows the declared GEDCOM version, physical encoding, individual/family/other-record counts, byte size, SHA-256 source identity, and coded findings.
  4. Add further sources as needed. At most eight slots are available, including pending or failed selections. Use Move up and Move down to set the order; source identity and root choices remain attached to their source.

Each source must fit the 512 MiB byte ceiling and the shared file-ingress limits. Inspection rejects more than 250,000 individual records before constructing the in-memory tree and root-candidate list. At most 100 findings are displayed, with the exact full finding count shown separately. Inspection checks do not certify genealogy accuracy, complete GEDCOM conformance, or lossless conversion by another product. See the compatibility reference for accepted, rejected, and preserved input classes.

Review a finding

Findings without a person anchor are marked Source-wide finding. For an anchored finding, activate Review affected person with the mouse or keyboard to request a single bounded preview. The preview shows the affected person’s name, source identifier, birth/death dates, and relationship counts, not raw GEDCOM lines or a complete record. Missing, ambiguous, or unavailable anchors produce a stable error code instead of showing a guessed match.

Reviewing a finding does not select or clear a root, including an explicit no-root choice. Person previews are temporary and are discarded with their source; responses arriving after source removal are ignored.

Choose a root deliberately

For each completed source, enter a name or source identifier in Find a root and activate Search candidates. Queries are limited to 128 characters; each UI page shows at most 25 candidates. Next candidates continues the same query. An empty query starts from the first page and reports an exact total. A filtered request scans at most 4,096 candidates, so its total may be shown as Unknown and a continuation can be available even when the current page is empty. Exact person:<identifier> searches use the private index, report a known total, and never fall back to a fuzzy name match. A unique exact person lookup does not require fuzzy-scan continuation.

Use the source identifier, birth/death dates, and relationship counts to distinguish duplicate names. Candidate text is bounded and may be shortened; it is not an authoritative identity match. Use native radio-button keyboard controls to choose one candidate, or explicitly select Continue without a root. Screen readers encounter each page as a named candidate list, and long candidate labels wrap within the available viewport. The application never guesses a root. A selection remains visible when searching, paging, or reordering sources; a failed query clears it.

This selection is preparation for a future operation only. It does not create a rooted export or mutate records. All sources and choices are temporary, not saved projects or encrypted workspace records.

Remove a source or recover

Cancel, Remove, or leaving the workspace requests cancellation and disposal of the inspection. Reloading or replacing the document, restarting the native runtime, closing the window, or quitting the application revokes its Main-process authority. A restarted application begins with no retained sources or root choices. Removing a source while its native chooser is still open also cancels that selection and revokes any matching grant returned before submission. A completion that arrives after cancellation is ignored and discarded once; it cannot repopulate the removed slot. Private staged source bytes are normally removed when inspection reaches a terminal state. The bounded summary remains in process memory, and a minimal private root index remains on disk under a 15-minute lease. At most eight successful leases are retained. Disposal, shutdown, or lease expiry revokes the result and removes its index. An expired result requires selecting and inspecting the source again.

If a selection is oversized, invalid, replaced, or unavailable, remove its slot and choose a stable source again. For a sidecar or disposal failure, restart the application before retrying. Do not recover data from private staging or bypass the native chooser. Original source files remain unchanged, and no output needs to be salvaged.

Timeout, capacity, and worker-crash failures remain keyboard reachable as an alert with a reviewed recovery action and stable code such as REQUEST_TIMEOUT, GEDCOM_INTAKE_CAPACITY, or JOB_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE. Report only that code and whether failure occurred during selection, inspection, finding review, or root search. Do not attach real genealogy records, search text, names, identifiers, fingerprints, raw parser lines, logs, or local paths to a public issue.