Gedfire MCP server

GedFire

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.morrillonline/gedfire -->

GedFire is a command-line tool that lets an AI agent help with your family history research without giving it write access to your GEDCOM file. The agent writes its findings as a JSON proposal; you review it, approve the items you want, and GedFire applies them, keeping each citation attached to the claim it supports. It can then generate a static family-page site from the result.

agent research -> JSON proposal -> your review -> verified GEDCOM -> static HTML

GedFire works only with local files and makes no network requests. Your chosen AI client controls where tool results are processed.

Why not just let the agent edit the file? GEDCOM looks like plain text, but the level hierarchy, cross-record pointers, and continuation rules are easy to get wrong — agents asked to rewrite raw GEDCOM tend to produce broken levels, dangling references, or files that no longer validate. GedFire instead applies typed operations to a parsed document and refuses to write anything invalid, so a valid input file stays valid. As a bonus, the agent doesn't have to read and reproduce whole GEDCOM records, which saves a lot of tokens.

Browse a live generated family-page site → Generated from the synthetic family in docs/demo, rebuilt by CI on every push. Facts retain their source citations, available as hover-popover footnotes in the HTML.

MCP server

GedFire also runs as a Model Context Protocol server, so clients including Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and Codex can query your GEDCOM directly, in conversation, instead of shelling out to the CLI:

gedfire mcp --input family.ged

Install the global .NET tool before configuring a client. The command above starts a long-running stdio server, so waiting silently for a client connection is normal.

Most MCP clients accept the same local stdio server entry. Add this block to the client's MCP configuration, replacing the GEDCOM path with an absolute path:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gedfire": {
      "command": "gedfire",
      "args": [
        "mcp",
        "--input",
        "/absolute/path/to/family.ged"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Use that mcpServers entry in the location your client supports:

Codex uses TOML instead of the JSON wrapper above. Add this to .codex/config.toml in the project or ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.gedfire]
command = "gedfire"
args = ["mcp", "--input", "/absolute/path/to/family.ged"]

Two optional flags follow --input in args (or after --input on the claude mcp add / TOML command lines above):

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.