The International Crop Information System (ICIS) links pedigrees to phenotypic and genotypic data that is made easily accessible. The Genealogy Management System (GMS) interfaces ‘Central’ public databases that can have various levels of access, and ‘Local’ private databases within institutions. This facilitates the global sharing of non-sensitive pedigrees, selection histories and other descriptors in the Central database while interfacing with Local databases which contain sensitive data. Canadian public-sector durum wheat researchers have set up databases containing extensive phenotypic data (agronomic, disease and end-use functionality) from cultivar registration and pre-registration trials conducted over the past 25 years. Pedigree information on the lines is uploaded to the globally-available Central database so that pedigrees of Canadian lines can be traced back to ancestors and easily visualized for presentation purposes. The power of this system was demonstrated by tracing the sources of the low grain cadmium concentration allele by selective phenotyping of the lineages of diverse durum cultivars, and management of data for association mapping studies for discovery of QTL for biotic stresses.