How to Move Your Family Tree Off Ancestry or MyHeritage (Free)

You can move your family tree off Ancestry or MyHeritage for free, without canceling anything first. Both let you export a GEDCOM file — the standard, decades-old format every genealogy tool reads — and Naatri imports it directly. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and you can look at everything before it touches your real tree.

What actually comes with you, and what doesn't

Be clear-eyed about this before you start: a GEDCOM file carries names, dates, relationships, and notes. It does not carry photos, documents, DNA matches, hints, or source citations — those are tied to the platform you're leaving, not to the file format. If your Ancestry or MyHeritage subscription is mainly valuable to you for records and DNA matching, GEDCOM export won't replace that. If what you actually want is your family's structure — who's related to whom, names, dates — in a tool you can keep using for free, that's exactly what transfers.

Step 1: Export a GEDCOM file

From Ancestry:

1. Open your tree, then click the tree name in the upper-left corner.
2. Choose Tree Settings from the dropdown.
3. Click Export Tree.
4. Wait — for a large tree this can take several minutes — then click Download your GEDCOM file.

Only the tree's owner can do this. If you're a guest, contributor, or editor on someone else's tree, you won't see the export option.

From MyHeritage:

1. Click the down arrow next to your tree's name, top-left.
2. Choose Tree Settings.
3. Near the bottom of the page, click Download your GEDCOM file.

Either way, you end up with a .ged file in your downloads folder.

Step 2: Import it into Naatri

Sign in, then go to Import a family tree (also reachable from the account menu as "Import a GEDCOM file…"). Upload the .ged file — up to 12 MB — and it lands in a draft. Nothing is added to your real trees at this point.

The import screen tells you exactly what it found: how many people and families loaded, plus any notes about dates or records it couldn't parse cleanly (GEDCOM exports vary in quality between platforms, so a few fuzzy dates or skipped fields are normal, not a sign something went wrong). From there you review the draft using the normal tree view, and only then decide: Keep as a new tree, or discard it. If you don't decide either way, the draft deletes itself automatically after 30 days — nothing lingers by default.

Why the review step exists

Most import tools either commit immediately or fail silently on anything unexpected. Neither is good when the data is your actual family. Landing in a throwaway draft first means a messy export, a duplicate branch, or a misparsed date is something you catch by looking at your tree normally — not something you find out about after it's already merged into your real one.