Editing GEDCOM (section)

===Support for multi-person events and sources===
A GEDCOM file can contain information on events such as births, deaths, census records, ship's records, marriages, etc.; a rule of thumb is that an event is something that took place at a specific time, at a specific place (even if time and place are not known).  GEDCOM files can also contain attributes such as physical description, occupation, and total number of children; unlike events, attributes generally cannot be associated with a specific time or place.

The GEDCOM specification requires that each event or attribute is associated with exactly one individual or family.<ref name=gedcom2627>GEDCOM Standard 5.5, pp. 26–27.</ref>  This causes redundancy for events such as census records where the actual census entry often contains information on multiple individuals.  In the GEDCOM file, for census records a separate census "CENS" event must be added for each individual referenced.  Some genealogy programs, such as [[Gramps (software)|Gramps]] and [[The Master Genealogist]], have elaborate database structures for sources that are used, among other things, to represent multi-person events.  When databases are exported from one of these programs to GEDCOM, these database structures cannot be represented in GEDCOM due to this limitation, with the result that the event or source information including all of the relevant citation reference information must be duplicated each place that it is used.  This duplication makes it difficult for the user to maintain the information related to sources.

In the GEDCOM specification, events that are associated with a family such as marriage information is only stored in a GEDCOM once, as part of the family (FAM) record, and then both spouses are linked to that single family record.<ref name=gedcom2627/>