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What's the best, or most standard, way to record membership in a fraternal organization in GEDCOM? The closest tag I could find in the list of GEDCOM 5.5 tags on http://wiki-en.genealogy.net/GEDCOM-Tags is CORP:

CORP {CORPORATE} A name of an institution, agency, corporation, or company.

Would that be appropriate, or is something else better?

As a side note, I use webtrees which doesn't seem to support this tag in a standard setup - is it not widely recognized?

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When looking at a list of all the official GEDCOM tags (lists such as GEDCOM Tags and GEDCOM 101 - Tags in the GEDCOM 5.5 Standard, one needs to be aware of the applicable GEDCOM version level. This determines whether the tag is still valid and where it is supposed to occur in the GEDCOM's structure. (A nice example of the GEDCOM sub-structure is found at Version 5.5, Chapter 2).

CORP is not a fact or event. It belongs in the HEADER as "Name of the business, corporation, or person that produced or commissioned the product" (GEDCOM Standard, Draft Release 5.5.1, pages 23 & 54) that generated the GEDCOM.

Other than RELI (religion), there don't seem to be any tags that can be used for organizations that the individual belonged to. EDUC (Education) is the "Indicator of a level of education attained," but, in my database, I will include the name of the institution in the description, and I use a custom tag called "Hobbies and Interests" for non-occupational organizations.

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    I've looked into this more, and have used "1 FACT Order of the Eastern Star 2 TYPE Membership" - does that seem reasonable, rather than adding a custom tag? Feb 21, 2016 at 9:01
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    FACT may probably more transferable between programs. I haven't had any problems with the programs I've used (FTM, RM, Legacy), but I've heard sometimes custom tags are converted to Facts or Events and other programs ignore them on import. The disadvantage with generic FACT comes when creating reports or identifying groups of people with a similar characteristic.
    – bgwiehle
    Feb 21, 2016 at 13:29

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