Title: Problem uploading GEDCOM
Last modified: November 2, 2025

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# Problem uploading GEDCOM

 *  [stevendaily](https://wordpress.org/support/users/stevendaily/)
 * (@stevendaily)
 * [6 months, 4 weeks ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/problem-uploading-gedcom/)
 * After installation, while I was able to upload a GEDCOM file, no one was being
   added to the database. Indeed, none of the GEDSHOW tables even existed in the
   database. I found that MySQL was throwing errors when trying to create the ‘_gedshow_names’
   table. The errors were 1074 – Column length too big for column ‘note’ (max = 
   16383) and 1118 – Row size too large. Changing the `note` field to VARCHAR(1000)
   solved the problem. Using phpmyAdmin, I manually created the table:
 * `CREATE TABLE [prefix]_gedshow_names (
   id int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,indref 
   VARCHAR(22) NOT NULL,given VARCHAR(100),surname VARCHAR(100),gender VARCHAR(1)
   NOT NULL DEFAULT 'U',living VARCHAR(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Y',dob VARCHAR(35),dod
   VARCHAR(35),note VARCHAR(1000),UNIQUE KEY id (id)) COLLATE = 'utf16_general_ci';
 * I also had to manually update wp-config.php to add this line:
 * `define('ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS', true);`
 * After uploading the file successfully, I deleted this line from wp-config for
   security.
 * This may be helpful to others.
    -  This topic was modified 6 months, 4 weeks ago by [stevendaily](https://wordpress.org/support/users/stevendaily/).

The topic ‘Problem uploading GEDCOM’ is closed to new replies.

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 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [stevendaily](https://wordpress.org/support/users/stevendaily/)
 * Last activity: [6 months, 4 weeks ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/problem-uploading-gedcom/)
 * Status: not resolved